That's a big hypothetical, though. Andrew Wiles had been producing sensible mathematics in the community already, so there was no reason to suspect him of being

That's a big hypothetical, though. Andrew Wiles had been producing sensible mathematics in the community already, so there was no reason to suspect him of being a crank. Also, his proof did not emerge in a vacuum, he pursued approaches that were already known to be connected to FLT. As for FLT attracting nonsense solutions: Yes, plenty of them. It being such a simply stated problem, and immediately understandable to laypeople certainly exacerbated the problem.