Not sure if anyone's still reading this thread, but I'm happy to talk more about it. Talking about "giving up string theory" is kind of dumb - essentially what you are saying is "do not try to do the following large class of calculation." There are definitely competitors to string theory, but none have captured the attention of a highly fractious community the way string theory has. String theory should better be known as "a collection of approaches." It does not have the coherence of, say General Relativity, which is a mathematically closed system. Negative pressure is bizarre, and actually is from a Newtonian perspective a violation of the conservation of energy (in General Relativity, energy is not conserved - rather a complicated combination of numbers some of which refer to what we'd measure as energy is conserved.) Negative pressure means that if you take a box of the stuff, and let it expand, at the end of the day there's actually more stuff in there than you started with. They both require something called "negative pressure". Inflation and dark energy are deeply connected.
But it does invoke plenty of nonstandard physics we've never seen in the Universe, let alone the lab. I have spent quite a bit of time trying to come up with alternatives to inflation, and it's damn hard - it "works" very well, in the sense that it solves a bunch of problems all at once that are hard to solve individually. Very smart people (e.g., Sean Carroll, now at CalTech) have made convincing cases that inflation is actually incoherent in important ways. It's the best explanation for a very very limited number of datapoints we have on the "early" Universe. Inflation has not been "confirmed" in away way. I'm not a string theorist, but I am a cosmologist.
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