That is a better comparison, but not a great one. A new boson (and associated force) would be exciting but completely in line with known physics. Speed-of-light violations would be absolutely revolutionary, threatening almost everything we know about fundamental physics.
> personally I don't believe faster-than-light neutrinos exist.
You don't have to believe they they exist, they were quickly and conclusively disproven. As I recall, GPS was used as a time source and there was timer inaccuracies on Earth due to relativistic effects.
I wouldn't go so far as to say it was expected, it was more of a placeholder. It was more: 'Well, something doesn't add up here, so the 'boson' should fill that gap. And people went and searched for it.
I feel something simular to what we see here, the problem is trying to tie everything else that we know back into it.. I say problem but I really mean excitement to understand a bit more!
Again, this could all be completely wrong and it could even draw down to a bad input along the chain, but the idea is definitely something worth investigating!
Remember, the Higgs Boson brought us the imagination of changing a light particle (photon) to a particle with mass.. It's a quite wacky idea if you look at it from a point we knew many moons ago!