I am not as cynical as you imagine - however, the usual routes of replication and peer-review have done little to help move LENR from the fringe to the center, so they are little useit seems. I am looking for other paths. The observation of XSH during electrolysis was not even an experiment to find it, but seen during fuel preparation. It just so happened that the same metal mix (devised by Russ) was being electrolysed with both heavy and light water, using a very similar cell structure, The LW cell was pulling twice the current of the HW cell, even so the HW cell was stubbornly a few degrees warmer over many hours.
The merit in writing these things up is that this (anecdotal) information can be examined and a judgement made about whether the quantified observations indicate something new (e.g. LENR) or behaviour expected from chemical reactions. There is a sort of intermediate possibility where unexpected chemical reactions deliver unusually high (but still within possible chemical limits) energy.
Without that process, initially from the experimenter and then checked by others, no-one will leap on LENR as the most likely reason. Nor should they.