Dear Vladimir Rogozhin,
Thanks for the link to the article of Carlo Rovelli, I didn't know its existence. I have read it with a smile. Partly because idea's are like biological evolution. Every person who's doing foundational science has - more or less - the impression that he/she is designing a brand new conceptual creation. But ideas don't differ from "tangible" phenomena, like force fields. They transform in space and time, what we call "evolution".
You stated in your post that general relativity and quantum mechanics are phenomenological based theories that both lack a proper foundation. I fully agree with you. Unfortunately, quantum field theory is partly a mixture of both theories ( gauge theories). However, it is a bit strange that so many scientists don't bother about it. Because it is well known that every reliable hypothesis about the foundations must be able to envelope all the other existing theories to be "more" true. If I remember well, every student gets this information during the scientific education.
I cannot rate essays because I threw the code away. I don't like ratings (and I don't like winning prizes too). If the FQXi's contest was without prizes, maybe I was more interested to participate. Because the aim of the contest is to stimulate new scientific ideas. That's why I have the opinion that "winning" the contest is some kind of an honor because it shows the relavance. Like an accepted publication by Nature magazine. But may be I am a bit old fashioned. ;-))
A rating of 1 isn't much! When I was at school a rating of 2 was the minimum. We only got a 1 for handing in an empty sheet of paper ;-)
With kind regards, Sydney