You might enjoy reading _The Structure of Scientific Revolutions_. #9 is explicitly discussed there. It is often a case when the old incorrect theory has a lot of work in it and many of the anomalies are explained by additional mechanism, e.g. the geocentric theory had a lot of bells and whistles in the end and it was quite precise in some cases. When the heliocentric theory was created, it was actually worse at predicting the movement of celestial bodies because it was too simplistic and was not able to handle various edge cases. Related to your remark about gravity, it took more than 50 years to successfully apply the theory of gravity to predict how Moon will behave.
You might enjoy reading _The Structure of Scientific Revolutions_. #9 is explicitly discussed there. It is often a case when the old incorrect theory has a lot of work in it and many of the anomalies are explained by additional mechanism, e.g. the geocentric theory had a lot of bells and whistles in the end and it was quite precise in some cases. When the heliocentric theory was created, it was actually worse at predicting the movement of celestial bodies because it was too simplistic and was not able to handle various edge cases. Related to your remark about gravity, it took more than 50 years to successfully apply the theory of gravity to predict how Moon will behave.