This whole "neutrinos travelling faster then photons" thing

There was a lengthy article about this whole "can neutrinos travel faster than the speed of light" debate in this morning's City AM, entitled Why Albert Einstein might have been wrong after all and why this really matters.

I don't get the excitement.

From what I understand, many scientists, including Einstein, assumed that certain forces or particles or waves (light, radio, gravity etc) travel at a certain fixed speed (in a vacuum, relative to the observer etc) and that nothing can travel faster than that. It was inspired guesswork that made Einstein and others agree that the fastest thing of all is photons, which people refer to as "the speed of light" rather than referring to it as "the speed of radio waves" or "the speed of gravity" or anything else (interestingly, they didn't decide for sure whether gravity propagated at the speed of light until 2003, despite common sense saying that it must do).

Now, neutrinos weren't invented, defined, discovered, whatever, until long after it became accepted that the thing which travels fastest is photons, which as Einstein himself acepted, do not travel in straight lines and can be bent by gravity, therefore they can be slowed down, however slightly.

So had Einstein and all his contemporaries known about neutrinos, they might well have decided that the things which travel fastest is neutrinos - because gravity cannot slow them down, heck, not even solid rock can slow them down - and that photons travel a tiniest smidge slower*. All the equations which require people to know the speed at which photons travel (such as the GPS satellites, there are few other practical applications of this knowledge) would then perhaps be the tiniest smidge more accurate, but so what?

If you ask me, the whole thing is about as dramatic as people always assuming that the cheetah is the fastest land-based animal, and that no animal can run faster, but it turning out that there's a little known related species of big cat which can actually run 0.001 mph faster. The far more fundamental points are that (a) "there is a maximum speed at which any animal can run"; and (b) we know roughly what that speed actually is.

* There was an article in a recent Metro saying exactly that - there was a distant super nova or something and the neutrinos therefrom arrived on earth a split second before the photons - but nobody was surprised because the photons had to battle their way out of the gravitational field first, time travelling more slowly in a strong gravitational field, as any fule kno, or else light would be bent away from heavy objects, not towards them.