In other words, how long is it before the revisionist work gets a seat at the table? Of course, if a new argument is introduced with the evidence to back it up, eventually it's going to have some traction.
But do things like re-examining population levels in the pre-Columbian Americas always get folded in with stuff like The Oatmeal's Tesla worship comic or "the Civil War was about states' rights" right off the bat?
I know some historians are going to look at new ideas more openly than others, but what about history as an institution, so to speak?
Is the ratio of Lost Cause-type trash to actual scholarship just not in favor of someone doing revisionist work?
In my experience, whether "revisionist" is a bad word or not depends entirely on the field and the existing connotations of the word within that field. In the study of Greek warfare, there is currently a great deal of revisionism, which has been given the somewhat unfortunate term "heresy". Its main proponent is now actively trying to claim the name "revisionist", since he finds it more neutral and constructive than "heretic".
There are certainly some areas in which "revisionism" is a euphemism for "politically motivated pseudo-history". But the word just means a movement to see things in a new way, and as long as that new way has some academic merit, the term need not be pejorative.
I think we also must distinguish between "revisionism" as used by other historians and as used by (often politically-motivated) outsiders. For many scholars, revisionism has become not only neutral, but rather standard. Of course newer generations will revise the opinions of older ones. Among many non-trained commentators, however, "revisionism" is a dirty word, meaning something like a bunch of commies doing away with the old "true" history in favor of "PC" or "identity politics," or whatever other bugbears one might prefer.
I think we Americanists are pretty used to the latter usage of the term.