I know that while flight was being developed many (most?) people were at best skeptical of the idea and at worst dismissed it out of hand. Did this attitude significantly delay the advent if flight, or were there hard technical limitations like engine weight that would have prevented flight from taking place even if the general population believed it was possible and supported research?
Would you mind expanding further on what you mean by general public incredulity that heavier than air flight was possible? Presumably, most people had seen a bird before.
It would be impossible to prove an assertion like that, but it is reasonable to assume that any industry involving a new technology is held back by uncertainty, and that removing that uncertainty would be a great boost to that industry.
In this example, if you could have convinced everyone (including investors, inventors, and engineers) in 1900 that there was a very large passenger airline industry coming soon and that industry growth would be strong at least into the first decades of the next century, you would have made swarms of engineers and investors jump from other industries into the airline industry and no doubt have increased the pace of development considerably.
The real question here is whether your initial assertion is correct: "I know that while flight was being developed many (most?) people were at best skeptical of the idea and at worst dismissed it out of hand." How do you know that?