Just so. In the 1990s I was part of a group called the Space Access Society, which was a bunch of cranky but idealistic rocket scientists (and enthusiastic amateurs; John Carmack was a constant presence with his Armadillo Aerospace) trying to foster cheap access to space by any means possible.
These efforts were regarded with huge levels of skepticism / disinterest / dismissal from NASA and the mainstream aerospace industry, which consistently confused the second kind of viability with the first. When these people couldn't raise and/or manage the funds to actually implement their ideas, this was regarded by many as proof of the physical impossibility of cheap access to space. Most of the industry regarded them as crackpots.
Then Elon Musk came along and proved the crackpots right and the industry wrong. He could do this because physics was on the side of the crackpots and always had been, even if the market was not. That's a necessary but not sufficient condition; what he also needed -- and just barely had -- was the financial resources and organisational capacity to go up against the market and win.
There are aerospace forums[1] where one can still find smatterings of the old guard insisting that Elon Musk is just a smoke-and-mirrors phenomena; that spaceflight will always be intrinsically expensive because physics (in a hand-wavey, strictly no-calculations kind of way) says it must be so; that the only reason his rockets are cheap is because he's underpaying his workforce and working them to death; that it's impossible to re-use a rocket -- seriously, they're still saying this, even after it's been done three times already; that the Shuttle proved that reusability can never lower the cost of spaceflight, etc. etc. etc.
Some of these people have PhDs in aerospace engineering; some of them have worked on the space shuttle. No matter: they're in the throes of a cargo cult, and they're wrong. Physics are right.
Do the numbers. Engineering is done with numbers. Analysis without numbers is only an opinion.[2]
1: forum.nasaspaceflight.com/index.php
2: http://spacecraft.ssl.umd.edu/akins_laws.html