The DSM exists to give labels to groups of symptoms, it's not a theoretical framework and all the above problems are due to people mistaking it as such. You se

The DSM exists to give labels to groups of symptoms, it's not a theoretical framework and all the above problems are due to people mistaking it as such. You seem to be conflating the DSM as it used by clinicians and the DSM as it is used by researchers, its use by researchers is indeed dubious, but clinicians need a lingua franca for making diagnoses - they're not academics. If you want theories, there's always psychoanalysis :p