Around 1990, theoretical and experimental evidence has emerged that forces between charged particles suspended in dilute solutions of monovalent electrolytes might be attractive at larger distances. This evidence is in contradiction with the PB theory discussed above, which always predicts repulsive interactions in these situations. The theoretical treatment leading to these conclusions was strongly criticized.  The experimental findings were mostly based on video-microscopy, but the underlying data analysis was questioned concerning the role of impurities, appropriateness of image processing techniques, and the role of hydrodynamic interactions. Despite the initial criticism, accumulative evidence suggest that the DLVO fails to account for essential physics necessary to describe the experimental observations.
While the community remains skeptical regarding the existence of effective attractions between like-charged species, recent computer molecular dynamics simulations with an explicit description of the solvent have demonstrated that the solvent plays an important role in the structure of charged species in solution, while PB and the primitive model do not account for most of these effects. Specifically, the solvent plays a key role in the charge localization of the diffuse ions in ion-rich
domains that bring charged species closer together. Based on this idea, simulations have explained experimental trends such as the disappearance of a scattering peak in salt-free polyelectrolyte solutions and the structural inhomogeneities of charged colloidal particles/nanoparticles  observed experimentally that PB and primitive model approaches fail to explain.