AIUI, a lot of the pushback on those responses was due to how they were collected and published. The call for responses was mostly circulated privately among pro-Schenkerian scholars, and the broader profession only got to know about it at the last minute. And the author of the original paper was given no opportunity to provide a rejoinder.

I'm not even sure that the actual written paper had even been published at that time: the basic arguments of the paper were first summarized in a conference presentation, and of course it is terrible form to publish a purported critique of something that hasn't even been fully presented in full detail! The whole thing has really reflected pretty badly on the authors of these 'critiques', for very good reasons overall.