Not so, though. If you read the page about the Tychonic system, you saw that the objection to Copernicus was not "that theory requires stellar parallax, but there is no stellar parallax". It was "If that theory is true, then the fact that there is no stellar parallax implies that the stars are very far away". The Copernicans rightly responded "so what?" But the Tychonians trusted their guts, which told them that that was a priori impossible.

And everything you've said about Newton refers to answering the question of how much stuff is attracted to other stuff, not why it is. He was able to show that the natural motion of everything is circular (unless it's in perfect stasis), and to describe with great precision the form of the circles involved (and how they deform into ellipses), but there's no why anywhere. Newton can't justify the force of gravity varying with the square of distance except by observing that it happens to work in practice. He certainly can't explain why it's not zero -- it could have been zero. (Sure, it's very fair to say he told us why Kepler's laws obtained. But that wasn't the question, the question was "why is stuff attracted to other stuff?")