[auntienomen]

I've never found that Peter Woit's critiques of string theory match up very well to the reality of what string theorists are doing.

Woit's critiques are of string theory as an extension of the Standard Model. But most string theorists are not working on string theory trying to get predictions about current energy frontiers. Rather, they are working on understanding the mathematical structure of string theory and seeing what it can teach us about analogous mathematical structures in quantum field theory. (A now classic example: The first calculable models of 4-dimensional confinement came out of string theory.)