That is essentially what they were referred to, perhaps not using that exact term in every instance, although some even referred to themselves using that term.
Where did you read this? What are your sources? Who referred to them this way, and which of them referred to themselves this way? I knew many of these people. I worked with them. I have never heard of anything like this.
We are talking about people such as two Nobel laureates, a Fellow of the Royal Society, the Department Chairman (Pons), and Bockris, who literally wrote the book on Modern Electrochemistry. (That's the title.) They included two of the researchers who developed the atomic bomb at Los Alamos, the researchers who developed the atomic bomb for India, the Chairman of the Indian Atomic Energy Commission, and one of the commissioners on the French AEC. Most of them were jealous of their prerogatives. Full professors with 30 to 50 years of experience never refer to themselves as hobbyists or amateurs. Look at the credentials of the people who attended the 1989 NSF meeting, for example. Are you suggesting that Edward Teller was a hobbyist?
I think you made this up. I think you have not met the researchers, and you read nothing about them, or the books by Mallove and Beaudette.
I suppose some ignorant internet trolls have called them hobbyists. People have called them every name imaginable, but "hobbyist" would be one of the most inaccurate.
Not only are they not hobbyists by any stretch of the imagination, but there is a world of difference between the quality of their equipment and experiments and that of the hobbyists. The hobbyists made dozens of mistakes that no professional scientist would make. The scientists know enough to write multivolume authoritative books about electrochemistry, calorimetry, tritium, spectroscopy and other key subjects the hobbyists know nothing about. All of the professionals have PhDs, which means they spent years slaving away under people such as Bockris and Fleischmann, learning every aspect of the research.
Let me add that LENR+ does not exist. It is a figment of Peter Gluck's imagination. Most of the claimed LENR+ results are either fake or mistaken, and the others are no better than the mainstream results. The best real results ever reported were with bulk palladium, reported by Stan Pons.