I've read some of Mandelbrot's works on finance and I would never put him in the same category as the "technicians". It's hocus pocus mumbo jumbo that I don't think he would subscribe to (e.g. Elliot Wave's "5 up, 3 down" principle).

Agreed. And finance was never the primary objective of Mandelbrot's development of fractals anyway, just a side effect of varying degrees of interest.

Elliot Wave appears to be an attempt to back fit a rather simplistic theory to patterns in financial time series data. Fractals are so much more.