To me as a lay-man, this seems like you are indeed ignoring non-dark matter solutions, as dark matter allows you to add various magical elements to explain up whatever is missing in other models. This seems very un-scientific.
It’s not like physicists are looking for every little possibility to be fanciful. Here’s the irony — The “DAMA” experiment has been claiming to have discovered dark matter particles for years, but most physicists don’t trust that the experiment is understood well enough to call it a victory. The process of “adding particles” is an extremely rigorous one (the various detailed checks and stringent requirements involved are unsexy content ignored by pop science). Adding particles is how we discovered the Higgs boson, the weak nuclear force carriers and the internal structure of the proton. It is a battle tested process that underpins the tremendous success of particle physics in the twentieth century.
> To me as a lay-man, this seems like you are indeed ignoring non-dark matter solutions
Seems like there is a massive disconnect with how one actually “does research”. Let’s say I completely agree with you and want to come up with alternative models, and I’ve read the literature — but don’t know how to solve the hairy outstanding problems. What do I actually do when I get up and go to work tomorrow morning? :-P
“Dark matter” is just a phenomenological name to whatever mechanism that might explain all the observations consistently. Under this banner, people have studied models of everything from axions to small black holes. Speaking as someone who’s worked in the field, nobody is “ignoring” alternatives to dark matter — if they could think of ways to make up new alternatives (leveraging MOND, or otherwise) they totally would do it — the problem is that most such alternatives raise more complicated questions like breaking the consistency our theory of gravity, or introducing bizarre quantum behavior of certain cosmological fields, etc. Maybe all those problems can also be solved — but nobody knows how! That’s why it appears like they “ignore” it.
Further, any new theory going to supplant dark matter needs to explain not just galactic rotation curves, but also beat the Lambda CDM model in its ability to model/predict details of the cosmic microwave background radiation. AFAIK, MOND or whatever else is not even close, when you try to put all that together.