Hi Shirley,
thank you for your comment.
We certainly agree that a controversial/cutting edge paper ahead of its time would have a hard time to be published today in a top-tier journal (unfortunately). However, I do not know if being published on PloS One would be really better than being published in a more specialized journal. As you point out, people working in a specialized field would read it and might get a real sense of this paper in a specialized journal, and from there could “evangelize” other people outside of the field to this interesting paper. But I am not sure that they would actually see it if it is published in PloS ONE, lost in the middle of a huge number of papers of more general interest and of various quality. Again, the main interest I see in PloS ONE is more on the free access side (but I have to confess that I actually consider submitting my next cutting-edge paper to Plos ONE if it is rejected by Nature, Science and Cell as I expect 
)
PS : I guess most of the people interested in that matter can actually read English anyway, so this is OK !