I more-or-less agree with the OP: I'm a neuroscientist, and it would be nice if I could use Bayesian analyses in my papers without it being a point of contentio

I more-or-less agree with the OP: I'm a neuroscientist, and it would be nice if I could use Bayesian analyses in my papers without it being a point of contention with reviewers. But it seems like one of the big advances in frequentist statistics in the last fifty years is the introduction of nonparametric methods, which don't require you to make strong assumptions about the distribution of your data. My understanding is that the field of Bayesian nonparametric inference is still in its infancy. Also, this paper seems relevant: http://stat.stanford.edu/~ckirby/brad/papers/2005NEWModernScience.pdf http://stat.stanford.edu/~ckirby/brad/papers/2005NEWModernSc... (Bradley Efron is in the running for Greatest Living Statistician.)