Dragoncon: Stuff they discussed

As I wrote yesterday, I attended several Dragoncon panels about How to Do It. From which I pass on the following:
•Several authors said (as Tim Powers did at an earlier con) they try to make their magic as scientific as possible (Laura Ann Gilman claimed her Retrievers books are all scientifically plausible). While that still doesn’t appeal to me, possibly they know something I don’t.
•In a panel on using magic in alternate history, the writers all agreed that it should be something that fitted the era they’re working in. Writer Leanna Renee Hieber said the great advantage of writing Victoriana fantasy is that they had so many competing belief systems and some they synthesized themselves, it was easy to pick one that worked.
The panelists also said it was important to keep the characters, even in alternate history, reasonably close to the originals, not simply making them into something they’d never become (I think panelist DB Jackson put it that while having Charles Lindbergh run for president on an anti-isolationist platform in 1940 [Plot Against America by Philip Roth] using Wendell Wilkie wouldn’t work because Wilkie didn’t share Lindbergh’s views on Jews and Nazis).
They also emphasized the importance of respecting other people’s views and beliefs, though there I disagree somewhat. I think there’s a difference between, say, an alternate history where Jews really do use the blood of Christian children in making Passover bread (an actual antisemitic belief) and an alternate history where the Order of the Golden Dawn or the Rosicrucians or the Theosophical Society is just as wrong as they are in our world. I’ve read Drums of Chaos (Jesus was one of Lovecraft’s Old Ones) and Julie Kenner’s Protector series (the Olympians were Homo superior, not gods) and I do think there’s a difference between “This god/pantheon is not real/good/what it appears to be” and “People who believe this are evil and should be killed” (establishing Allah as a demon who wants to kill everyone who doesn’t worship him, for example, would fit into the latter category) IMHO. That said, what seems a fair treatment to me may be offensive to someone else (I know plenty of Christians who’d be horrified by Drums of Chaos) so there’s no obvious solution.
Unfortunately I didn’t get to stay (I had another overlapping panel I wanted to catch) and ask them how they suggest dealing with history when it’s in dispute, as many things are, even among serious scholars (however you define that). Pick the majority view? Pick whichever view works for your story? I’d have been curious what they had to say.
Those were the main takeways. The discussion of women’s role in alternate history was interesting but didn’t give me specific talking points and some other panels either didn’t work for me or I wasn’t able to get in.