The idea of doing crazy hard stuff with a less time spent training isn't itself crazy. It is unorthodox though, and most of the 'evidence' that it can work is based on personal anecdotes or experiments, like mine. This of course presents a problem that i call the pseudoscience dilemma.
Never heard of it? Let me explain.
In another life (back before the turn of the century) i thought i was going to be a scientist. I had just received my bachelors degree in physics but really wanted to study consciousness. So i found a private grad school (the california institute of human sciences) that sounded awesome. The professors all had high degrees but were interested in exploring non-mainstream ideas - acupuncture for example - through the lens of the scientific method. Crazy stuff has been well documented but less well studied, and i wanted to be part of the group that was trying to figure some of it out.
The problem was, as it turned out, not the professors, but everyone else. Most of the students didn't have strong science backgrounds, but were attracted by the new-agey ideas and weren't particularly fond of thinking critically. They wanted magic. After my motorcycle accident where i lost my spleen, one fellow student asked me if i had started regrowing it using the power of my mind yet.
Um, No, but thanks for the idea.
What attracted
me to the ideas was wondering what was real and what wasn't, and how to figure that out. What attracted most of the other students to the program was that they already thought this stuff was real. And then there were the legions of salesmen (pick up any new age magazine and look at all the wonderful stuff you can buy that will turn-your-life-around for just three easy payments) selling modern day snake oil.
It's pretty reasonable to expect mainstream science to completely reject these 'pseudo-science' ideas, just based upon the intellectual (or ethical) nature of the majority of people who think they might in fact be true. Throw the baby out with the bathwater.
A look at the current culture of low-volume training presents a similar picture.