> Last I checked the there were enough free parameters in these calculations to make the calculations of less than convincing. For example those 'hadronic observables' make up such a big part of the actual results that what is left over is within the error bounds anyway.

Indeed, this is more like a fifteen-year-old understanding. For example in 2008 , the authors of https://inspirehep.net/literature/804184 tuned to reproduce the pion and kaon masses (to fix the quark masses) and then predict ~ a dozen further masses, and in 2015 they computed the proton/neutron mass splitting https://inspirehep.net/literature/1300659 . In https://inspirehep.net/literature/1675748 we reproduced the nucleon axial coupling to ~1%.