My hunch is that most of the feedback is from technicaly inclined people and most of them are expressing the 'coolness' of the infinite scroll rather than a cog

My hunch is that most of the feedback is from technicaly inclined people and most of them are expressing the 'coolness' of the infinite scroll rather than a coginitive-usability perspective. Maybe try doing a feedback round with non-technical people, possibly with something like usertesting.org. Also, the infinite scroll is a pretty old paradigm and Google would have definitely run it through its user tests, but htey obviously dont find a lot of value in it.