Questions for physics folks
Do physicists consider General Relativity to be a superior description of nature compared to Newton's laws in terms of its intrinsic ability to account for "fictitious forces", such as centrifugal and Coriolis "forces"?
Correspondingly, is it a correct statement to say that Newton's laws of motion only strictly apply in inertial frames of reference and therefore GR provides a more parsimonious account of the concept of "force"?
I've tried to find historical references that remark upon the ad hoc nature of the addition of "fictitious forces" to Newton's laws but it doesn't seem to me that physicists of the 17th - 19th centuries were overly concerned by these issues.
Is that a fair appraisal?
Note that I am not asking whether GR is a better description of nature than Newton's laws in general but rather with specific reference to the "fictitious forces" and the question of whether physicists actually considered them a fundamental issue that required a better or more parsimonious solution.