Has the Big Crunch been ruled out?
The Big Rip happens if the equation of state for the dark energy has $p/\rho = w&lt;-1$, and all empirical data give us $w\approx -1$. A Big Crunch requires a pretty high value of $w$ (it must go above -1/3 to just stop the acceleration), but of course if dark energy is changing over time it might do that.

So tentatively ruling out Big Crunches is the reasonable thing to do given observational evidence and the assumption that the future will not be wildly different. If one thinks we should be more open to dark energy changing (which is going to be rather unconstrained by observation for the foreseeable future) then we should also be more open to $w$ moving across the Big Rip boundary.