I thought his goal was a sort of parallel reconstruction (to unnecessarily abuse a shady law enforcement term), and so I'm not sure the above captures goals well...?
Disclosure: biochemist and technologist who happens to get a kick out of Wolfram's meanderings.
So far, I think (please someone correct me if I'm wrong) he's claimed the latter but not the former, and has it as a medium-term goal to claim the former but he is "not there, yet, but close".
I don't know if he's actually produced more efficient methods of computing results, if anybody knows of links, that'd be interesting to read.
I also think that he's heading down an interesting path (parsing the universe as a graph / cellular automata), it's an interesting choice of primitives. It does seem to be a Dual of fields, though, so I don't believe it can give us any more predictive power than modern Field Theory, but I guess we'll see!
Also remember it took decades before all of Einstein's 1905 predictions had been commonly accepted.
Does than mean we shouldn't judge Wolfram until 2031 at the earliest? I don't know...
To make a comparison that a lot of people use to justify fringe research, Einstein came up with general relativity mostly by himself, and it was a fringe concept, but it came with a set of predictions that could be verified with observation. Eventually those predictions were tested, and his idea “won”.
Until Wolfram’s ideas come bundled with refutable predictions that deviate from the standard model, it’s a smoke without a fire.
To restate the comparison, Einstein wasn’t writing pamphlets, going on speaking tours, or writing books about his “universal laws” for years before actually presenting the idea in a refutable form.
Einstein waited until he saw flames, to raise the smoke alarm, I’d that makes sense. Wolfram has been raising the smoke alarm for a while, but not providing any images of the fire.
It’s not a very good look, IMO, but reasonable people can disagree.