You're right, of course. The problem is that inflationary cosmology did a phenomenally great job of explaining so many things about the universe, with testable

You're right, of course. The problem is that inflationary cosmology did a phenomenally great job of explaining so many things about the universe, with testable and subsequently verified predictions (detailed predictions of patterns in the CMBR IIRC). The only catch is that it predicts the total mass/energy content of the universe to be about 5ish times what we actually observe in the form of matter interacting with electromagnetic force.