Maybe dark matter will turn out to be the Higgs boson. It is reckoned to exist only at very high energy levels but would be a suitably massive particle.
Given that the Higgs field is supposably what impart mass to all other particles in the universe is it such a stretch of the imagination to conclude that the Higgs particle is the source of at least some of the dark matter?
You mention luminiferous ether to good effect, the reason this "fad" caught on was because of the inertia of rest mass etc., but the Higgs field could also explain inertia. Believe it or not the luminiferous ether although debunked by the Michelson-Morley experiment in 1907, may be coming back into vogue under a different guise (dark matter) albeit with the same end result (i.e it may not be a propogating medium for light but it may answer some of the questions that brought the lumiferous ether "theory" into effect.).
You may find January's edition of Scientific American interesting, it gives an indepth look into the current understanding of the Standard Model of particle physics and where it is going. The whole January edition is devoted to this one subject.
  