Does acceptance of conjectures before they became theorems count?

Example 1. The Artin reciprocity law. When Artin went around to other people describing what he was trying to show, nobody else believed it and they laughed at him for thinking it might be true. See here. This period of non-belief was only 3 years (the time it took Artin from formulation to proof).

Example 2. Modularity of elliptic curves over $\mathbf Q$. The original version by Taniyama in 1955 was expressed too broadly, but after that was fixed up it still took a bit of time for the idea to be generally accepted as plausible. For over 10 years, Shimura believed the conjecture but Weil, Serre, and others did not. See Lang's account of the history of the conjecture here.

Weil's identification of the conductor of an elliptic curve over $\mathbf Q$ with the level of the hypothetical associated modular form, in 1967, finally made the conjecture falsifiable and would explain some numerical observations if it were true, e.g., the smallest conductor of an elliptic curve over $\mathbf Q$ is $11$ and the modularity conjecture would explain this because the modular curve $X_0(N)$ has genus $0$ for all $N < 11$, so no elliptic curve over $\mathbf Q$ could be the image of a morphism from $X_0(N)$ for $N < 11$.