Absolutely. I'm out of the field these days, but e.g supersymmetric WIMP dark matter was the most popular but got more and more clugely with low energy supersymmetry seeming less likely (or not as useful in solving the problems it meant to solve). Everyone would come up with some tuned ad hoc model for whatever dark matter "signal" was in fashion (before being ruled out); none of those were compelling. Fun to play with maybe, but didn't really tell us anything.