I'm a believer that most human actions are driven by fear. Insurance, investing, searching for airplanes...
I think a big part of "our" persistence in finding the Electra lies in our intrinsic fear of the two words: "unknown fate".
One can make the argument that this fear alone explains the existence and prolific spread of the world's major religions. We simply need to explain the end, to become more at ease with our own ultimate and unknown fates.
Take Titanic ... here we actually knew what happened before we knew exactly where she was on the bottom of the Atlantic, her "fate" along with 1500 unfortunate souls was "known". But not entirely ... we had conflicting reports of exactly how she struck the iceberg and how she sank, and we wanted a better explanation of "the end". We had to find her, if for no other reason then to invalidate our fear that something that large cannot be simply swallowed by our physical environment and disappear.
As for the various Earhart hypotheses, I myself am drawn to TIGHAR's thinking through my own simulated experience.
As silly as it sounds, I have over 2000 hours of simulator flight time over this very region of the Earth, the vast Pacific Ocean, in WW2-era aircraft as a member of two different virtual online "squadrons" of simulator pilots ... one Japanese, one American.
In the American squadron, we spent hours mastering the dead reckoning and other navigational techniques used by carrier and heavy bomber pilots throughout the war, flying scout, combat, search-and-rescue and long ferry missions across the theater. And we flew as though our lives depended on it, to honor those whose lives really did.
It did not take long for us to figure out that flying in the Pacific *always* required a backup to the main flight plan. And after learning that painful lesson a few different ways, we never left the carrier deck or the airstrip without a clear backup plan that every pilot making the flight understood to the last detail. This backup plan invariably included an alternative landfall wherever possible, and even if we were trying to find a moving carrier with no suitable airstrip nearby, the backup plan always involved (if applicable) finding a charted reef or tiny piece of land or even distant shoreline so we could establish our location, calculate wind drift based on the flight so far, and compute the current and future location of the carrier and adjust the flight plan. And this backup plan ALWAYS involved an account for fuel "bingo" ... the point at which you had enough fuel to return to "base" and thus had to decide whether to abandon the primary flight plan and go to backup.
Bottom line - we were mere simulator pilots with absolutely nothing on the line except our pride, and we always had a plan for alternative landfall.
And had we ever decided to simulate Earhart's leg from Lae to Howland (the longest simulation we ever did was an abridged version of the Doolittle raid involving 13 hours of flight from Hornet departure to airstrips in China), the alternative flight plan, had we not found Howland, would have absolutely, certainly involved a departure from that area at fuel "bingo" to the SSE to try and find Baker (for a position fix) or other islands of the Phoenix Group.
Does that mean Earhart and Noonan made it to Gardner? No, for all we know they could have missed Baker to the West, failed to spot Gardner or McKean, run out fuel and ditched at sea ... very very far from Howland AND relatively distant from Gardner. But given that the evidence suggests they were very close if not on top of Howland at the time of Earhart's last transmission, which also corresponds to a reasonable calculation for fuel "bingo" to reach Gardner/McKean, I think the heading called for in Noonan's backup plan would have taken them very close to Gardner, and have to assume Baker was obscured from view en route similarly to Howland.
Simulated experience and probability tell me TIGHAR is on the right track.