Would you mind explaining this line, please, Nereid?

My understanding of the phrase "tilting at windmills" is that it means an attack that is misguided, and likely to go unnoticed by the object of the attack, but which may well harm the Quixotic attacker himself.

So my best guess at what you are saying is, "Over the past 10-60 years, people have attacked the tenets of mainstream astronomy. However, the attacks have been so ineffectual that mainstream astronomers have ended up feeling more confident than before about their theories."

If this is what you mean, it seems to be at odds with planetary astronomy, given that just about everything we believed about Mercury, Venus, Mars, and the moons of giant planets sixty years ago has been entirely overturned.

Generally speaking, I suspect "arrogant" is sometimes a word used by the ignorant to describe the confident. (Which is not to suggest there is no such thing as arrogance in science.)

It also makes me think of the inane line often trotted out in discussions about life on other worlds: "It's very arrogant to believe we're the only life in the universe." (I have some thoughts about that which I might share on another occasion.)