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It is true that it's one of several potential alternative explanations, though, and laypeople or some subset of them seem to have a lot of trouble understanding

It is true that it's one of several potential alternative explanations, though, and laypeople or some subset of them seem to have a lot of trouble understanding why we focus on dark matter in preference to the alternatives. Some of the alternatives are crazy, of course, and laypeople are also apt to ask, "Why can't you just..." and then express some suggestion that either makes no sense, or is known to be maximally implausible. Some of the confusion around dark matter is sincere, but there does seem to be a bit of a fringe community who think that physicists just like it, and are ignoring viable alternatives, which is laughable: if anyone could come up with a convincing alternative we'd be all over it. There is simply no downside.

nitrogen 12y ago
...[people] think that [scientists] just like it, and are ignoring viable alternatives... I think this happens all too often with various sciences (biology, climatology, physics). I speculate it's because people don't think about the very long history that produced the current consensus in each domain; rather they only see the consensus as it currently exists, and assume it must have been placed that way by some design. If these things come up in casual conversation, as an interested layperson I try to emphasize that science is a process that has been proven to work better than other processes for gaining knowledge, and the current consensus in a scientific field is only a snapshot of that process.