Has it gone out of favor? I think it's experiencing a renaissance with the popularity of Paleo/Primal diets.

Thanks. Being rusty on the paleo/primal approach, I did the Wikipedia. This overall article says paleo generally includes 22-40% of calories from carbs.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paleolithic_diet

Paleo carb sources include root and fruit carbs, which Atkinite low carbers avoid. Atkins' induction regime has a limit of 20 carbs, which I guess is only about 1% of dietary calories.

Paleo is built on mimicking our pre-agricultural era diet, the problem being, nobody was there taking notes to be sure what that diet was. They get around this problem by looking at what modern hunter-gatherers eat. The problem there it seems to me is, modern hunter-gatherers tend to be active all day, and we are not. So it's difficult to pinpoint the one reason they are so healthy. Maybe it's continuous low level exercise, as much as diet. Maybe it's lots of sunshine and fresh air and not living in sick buildings most of their waking hours. Etc.

The Masai tribe are the physically healthiest looking, leanest group around, and they traditionally lived very low-carb, mainly on meat and milk. But they also walk all day. And their modern diet is apparently shifting to include lots of maize and less meat, yet the rural Masai still look fantastic. This suggests to me that exercise is pretty important in the mix.

What I like about low carb is that it cuts through all the complications and has the strongest scientific backing isolating a particular cause-effect mechanism. Maybe others are also operative, but this one seems to give a very big bang for the buck. And it's practical for the longer term.

Taubes said exercise doesn't help weight loss, but I think he's wrong on that score. Atkins said exercise was essential alongside low carb.

Low carb + exercise is my bet these days.