What I find charming about the alenax and some of the other weirdo designs on the referenced site is that they came from a time when the industry was still open and accessible enough that people were willing and able to forward radically new designs. Most of them failed, but others became standard.
I work in the startup software industry where it is a given that only one out of 20 are ever going to make money, the other 19, were somebody to see the software 20 years on, would probably remark, "Oh, what were those poor guys thinking". But in advance, nobody really knows which of the 20 will make the hit and you have to go through the drill with all of them to find out, just like the failed bike designs.