Ray Fair recently posted a very interesting commentary on the macroeconomics dust-up between Lucas/Sargent and Solow as described by Paul Romer and commented upon by many others. His position is interesting: he represents the Old Guard of macroeconomics who works with what are variously called Structural Econometric Models or Cowles Commission models.
I am one of the few academics who has continued to work with CC models. They were rejected for basically three reasons: they do not assume rational expectations (RE), they are not identified, and the theory behind them is ad hoc. This sounds serious, but I think it is in fact not.
The whole post is worth reading, but I find it useful because it highlights (perhaps not purposefully) very different ways of conceiving of the relationship between theory and data. One might view the CC tradition as an attempt to start with data and then use theory…
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Utopia, you are standing in it! 
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