Comment by zmgsabst

Relativistic aethers are called fields — and are mainstream.

Aether theories (in addition to providing the inaccessible preferred frame needed here) also simplify two issues with relativity:

- what frame does a photon have?

- what conveys gravitational wave memory to future particle trajectories?

In aether theories, photons correspond to the aether frame. But that gets set to nulls in relativity, which is a theory of sub-luminal perspectives.

(I suspect you knew all that, but other readers may not.)