Besides predicting the positions in the sky of each of the planets and explaining the lack of violent winds if the Earth were moving, epicycles predicted changes to the distances/brightnesses of the planets, they predicted Earth as the centre of the universe, they predicted the heavenly spheres. All is falsifiable, though in the case of the latter two predictions not directly with the technology of antiquity. It's not hard to explain why the model was not challenged much for about a millennium and a half.
I think this discussion boils down to whether the successful predictions of dark energy are really independent of the accelleration, or they're all merely all consequences of the same property of the universe. it's easy not to like dark energy because it appears not so tangible. It's hard to describe what exactly it is besides what it does, and it's hard to prove its existence by in a laboratory experiment. Maybe a few centuries from now people will laugh at dark energy. Or maybe they celebrate the remarkable insight that was made with our limited knowledge of our time.