Having spent years in marketing and advertising, I've come to identify a drawback in the way that people perceive, and are introduced to, the Paleo Diet and its derivatives. It's something that unfortunately detracts from its worth, because it distracts from its grounding in the truth and science of human evolution.
It starts with the way the human mind is structured. Humans do really well with identity; that is, we can easily and efficiently attach an identity to an idea, regardless of whether that idea is animate. I'm talking about brands, which permeate the business world but also leak outside of it. Brands are useful precisely because they take advantage of the natural way that humans perceive identity. For commercial purposes, 'Diets' are introduced as brands because this method is the most easily digested by the market, and therefore the most economically viable. Think about The Atkins Diet, The Cabbage Soup Diet, The Juice Diet, The Hollywood Diet, The South Beach Diet -- and holy shit -- The Paleo Diet.
This is part of the reason that the Paleo Diet is belittled and trumped by the caveman mystique. It's much easier for people to latch onto 'eat like your caveman ancestors with the Paleo diet' than 'discover the appropriate species-specific diet for the human animal'. Likewise, if you wrote a book titled An Analysis of Appropriate Human Foods Informed by Evolution, it would be a publisher's nightmare because there is no brand, no meme, no idea to make the book's information easily consumable or identifiable. This has positioned the Paleo Diet between a rock and a hard place, because the brand identity itself is ultimately what limits the power of its message.
