How do you handle a reviewer who rejects your syntactic analysis as too theory-specific?

I recently had a paper returned with the main criticism that my analysis depended too heavily on one framework and that the data should be presented more neutrally.

I can see the reviewer's point, but rewriting the paper to be framework-neutral would strip out the argument that makes it interesting.

How do you decide when to defend a theory-specific analysis and when to reframe it for a broader audience?