And I never got the impression that Miles, McKubre, or anyone else had near the long term, consistent, reproducible high output and high out/in that you and Mizuno are claiming this time around.
I never said they did. On the contrary, the paper concludes:
"As far as we know, this experiment has the best reproducibility and control, and the highest power output of any cold fusion experiment on record. The output to input ratio is also one of the best on record."
However, that has no bearing on scientific credibility. Experiments in 1990 were very difficult to replicate, and the success rate was low. But the signal to noise ratio was higher than Mizuno's present experiment, and they were replicated enough times to be sure they were real, in many different labs. By the criteria applied to scientific claims, there was no doubt cold fusion is a nuclear fusion effect. These results should have convinced every expert on earth.
You have to understand that scientific criteria are not those of industry, and not the ones you cite: "long term, consistent, reproducible high output." Such things are never held as reasons to believe a scientific claim, nor should they be. They are irrelevant.
The fact that a result is difficult to replicate is never taken as a reason to doubt it. If it were, no one would believe the top quark results, or any tokamak plasma fusion result.
Irreproducibility is never taken as a reason to doubt a result. If it were, no one would believe that cloned animals are real, because the success rate is about a hundred times worse than cold fusion.
The fact that a result is difficult to detect is never an issue. If it were, no one would believe in gravity waves, or any major astronomical discovery in the last half-century, such as the image of the black hole in the center of a galaxy, or planets orbiting other stars. Compared to cold fusion, these things are many orders of magnitude smaller, more difficult to detect, and it cost millions or billions of dollars to detect them. You will never read an article in Nature or the New York Times science section saying, "because it is so hard to detect planets, we should not believe them." That would be scientifically invalid. The only thing that counts is the signal to noise ratio.
(Actually, as it happens, the more difficult it is to detect something, and the more money it takes, the more people are inclined to believe the result. That's psychology, not science.)