The Extended Evolutionary Synthesis if often touted as some kind of necessary extension of current thinking about Biology. However is not a theory but rather just a “conceptual framework” or metaphor. And in fact, I see no reason not to expect that “the Modern Synthesis is already flexible enough to absorb these concepts without needing a ‘new’ framework”.
Indeed, it’s a mistake to suggest that anyone serious considers random genetic mutations as “driving” evolution, or that “DNA dictates everything upward, and nothing changes DNA backward”. The fact that “physiological, top-down signals from the cell and the tissue can actively dictate how genes behave and inherit traits” is well known and can be understood to be something that evolved purely by the process of natural selection. And if ever evolution eventually gets managed by some organism making deliberate changes to its own and other genomes (and epigenomes) then, although it may make sense and be more efficient as a prediction tool to use the idea of the managers’ motivation as a “causal” factor, the fact will remain that the whole process could also be “explained” as a result of natural selection having acted on random mutations with the effect (but not the “goal”) of eventually producing a species with that directive capacity. (But, even if that capacity leads to some period of dominance by its possessors, it will not have been selected for until already achieved and the selective pressures leading up to it were for characteristics and behaviours that gave other advantages rather than with having such intelligent self design in “mind” from the outset.)
What I will agree with the EES proponents on, though, is that there may have been a brief period when it was considered possible that DNA might be the only carrier of hereditary information in an organism, and that failure to discuss alternatives may contribute to a sense that none exist. The main reason for not discussing alternatives in justifications for Natural Selection as an explanation for evolution is just that DNA is the most easily understood mechanism of inheritance and is known to be mutable at a rate which is sufficient for selection from random mutations of DNA alone to be sufficient to explain much of the variety of life forms around us. The fact that some mutations may be due to changes in the epigenetic environment rather than just in the DNA sequence itself only increases the plausibility of the basic thesis that natural selection applied to the effects of random mutation is a sufficient explanation for that variety.