I thought I'd let those heavily involved with this debate know how it looks to the casual reader:
1) jas and Fidel claim that it is immediately obvious that there is no way the towers could have fallen as fast as they did without something more than just collapse and that there is no way the fire could have weakened the building enough to trigger the collapse.
2) Pants-of-dog cites that the temperature of the fire (700-900 C) is sufficient to greatly reduce the strength of the metal supports, and then cites that the kinetic energy gained by the top part of the tower when it falls the height of a floor is sufficient to destroy the next lower floor, leading to a collapse in, roughly, the time seen.
3) A ton of posts back and forth on minor points.
4) Fidel claims that the only way anyone would disagree with him is if they are corrupt, but seems unable to rebut the claim that he believes Newton's third law can be applied to a falling object (without, at the same time, applying it to some other object which is, um, very much bigger than either tower).
Does NIST have a description of the collapse of the towers that is basically correct? I don't know, but I expect so. Are there some minor gaps in their description that could be covered better? Maybe, but it's not clear what they are. However, what jas and Fidel sometimes claim is that the flaws in the NIST description are complete obvious to casual inspection. In my view, Pants-of-dog has prettily clearly rebuted this claim - the description of the collapse in (2) is not completely unreasonable.
Maybe that description is incorrect, but if there's something wrong with it, then the innacuracy is somewhat subtle. If you object to their description, you need to be clear about your objections.
Also, it proves nothing to cite a petition of 1200+ experts, who think the NIST investigation is insufficient. To my consternation, when I google my name, I find that one of the first hits is a message I sent to NIST complaining that their investigation of WTC7 was inadequate in a certain, specific way. That doesn't mean that I dispute the general conclusion that rubble from WTC1/2 hit WTC7, that that started a fire in WTC7, and that the fire caused the building to collapse. I just think they need to investigate some of the details more thoroughly.The majority of the 1200+ signatories may feel similarly.
(PS: To avoid unfairly putting words in other people's mouths here, I should say that the description in (2) is my summary of the many thoughtful posts by Pants-of-dog, and not his.)