There's a great quote from Sherlock Holmes that goes something like, "when you have eliminated all possibilities, whatever remains, however unlikely, must be the truth."
To me, it's not quite enough to just say that you don't believe something, or that the evidence does not meet one's criteria. I want to hear an alternative explanation that fits the facts without bending them. TIGHAR, to their credit, have done this on nearly every area of their hypothesis. Proof? No. But anticipating the flaws in their hypothesis and advancing credible explanations for them? Absolutely.
This is one reason I'm not particularly impressed with the naysayers' arguments. It is not enough to merely poke holes in a theory. You need to be able to come up with a better explanation of your own that fits the facts and the situations as they were (not as they are now, or were at some other time, or would like them to have been), and critically think one's own arguments. This is something few people do, and one of the reasons I have always liked TIGHAR's approach, because they do do this. I knew from reading this website in the past that TIGHAR had gone through and verified all of the song lyrics in Betty's Notebook as being period-authentic, to give one example, and did not bring it up because I assumed someone as thorough as Malcolm would not have advanced the criticism about authentication without already knowing this. But he did...which is what frustrates me sometimes about the potshots that keep getting leveled. Most of this stuff has already been asked and answered credibly, and I confess to rolling my eyes when someone comes up with a highfalutin' GOTCHA and I know full-well TIGHAR dealt with this or that issue at some length 10 years ago and the person just hasn't done their homework.
What I DO like is when someone comes up with something new, pro or con. That's the good stuff, and it helps advance us to the truth. Because skepticism for its own sake is not objectivity. It is simply another form of bias -- professional skeptics often are deathly afraid of looking stupid or being played for suckers, and want to preserve intellectual superiority at all times -- but radical changes in our understanding of the world are more often advanced by people thinking out of the box, and who are often ridiculed for going against the prevailing wisdom -- not because they are blind believers, but because they put two and two together and didn't worry that everyone else said it made five. To see the truth, you have to be able to follow the threads of evidence wherever they lead, even if they lead somewhere that counters conventional belief and in the short term your peers may make fun of you.
However, healthy skepticism equally applied coupled with an open mind that weighs competing arguments fairly and critically thinks its own arguments' weaknesses as hard as it does others -- now, there's an approach that, in my opinion, arrives at the truth. And coming up with new ways of looking at the problem that meet these criteria, wherever they point, is really valuable.
So let's say Amelia Earhart's plane washes up on Howland tomorrow. It will still leave us with a fascinating conundrum, because none of the alternative explanations for Betty's Notebook, or the post-loss messages, or the artifacts found at the Seven Site, have to me manifested a fraction of the thoroughness and attention to detail that TIGHAR's has. These things are explained away, in my opinion, far too glibly and without taking into account a lot of the actual factual details surrounding them. If you look closely at all these issues, they are much harder to explain away. I do agree it is manifestly unlikely for Betty's Notebook, for example, to be what it purports to be...but the alternative explanations are so much more unlikely as to beggar belief. The basis for believing in the alternative explanations mostly lies in the incredulity that she actually heard Earhart -- but that, in itself, is not an argument.
There's a difference between being unconvinced of something and being convinced something didn't happen because you find it too fantastic, and in so doing reach for an explanation that, if examined closely, is even more unrealistic. But because it has the comfort of not being a sensational claim, we feel safe in making it.
Which brings me back to Sherlock Holmes: "when you have eliminated all possibilities, whatever remains, however unlikely, must be the truth." I personally find it highly unlikely she faked the journals, but it's certainly possible and doable assuming she did it in 1937. The other explanations advanced simply don't wash when given the same level of scrutiny the Earhart scenario is. Now this does not mean there couldn't be some other explanation, some odd coincidence of fate and misunderstanding and the mystery of radio, that's even odder than an Earhart reception. But I would say whatever that would be, would be an even more fascinating and unlikely scenario than the one we're looking at.