Hi Vladimir,
You ask "What incomplete ugly architectural plan were you referring to in that exchange?"
The point is that in fact, there is no architectural plan in quantum theory, which isn't even a true theory by my strict standards of correspondence between theory and result, which can also be interpreted as correspondence of language and meaning, or of blueprint to structure. In quantum theory, "What you see is what you get." (George Ellis has some elegant explanations in his essay forum on this "top down" relation between abstraction and physical realization.)
What you see as weakness in relativity, I see as strength. You write, "It is so structured as to shut out possibly important aspects of reality, viz. the ether, a timeless universe, and worst of all, the possibility of an absolute physics not dominated everywhere by the observer's point of view. Einstein proposed *absolute observation* (c is constant) but this made the Universe relative."
Actually, Einstein knew -- and intended -- that general relativity is incomplete. In fact, he objected to the label "relativity" for his theory (Mach was the true relativist), thinking that it should be called the theory of invariance or something similar. History overruled him. What general relativity does do, is to completely explain gravity in the classical domain, the large scale structure of the universe. It's a bit misleading to say that relativity is "dominated everywhere by the observer's point of view," because the actual physics is the same for every observer ("all physics is local").
"But why insert an observer in every point in the universe?" Because an observer already exists at every point in the universe, as Bose-Einstein statistics demonstrates. That's what allows any number of bosons to occupy any point, in contrast to Fermi-Dirac statistics in which a massive particle (fermion) can occupy only one state at one time. The reconciling of bosonic properties with fermionic properties in a smoothly connected theory of quantum gravity is an open problem.
"What if one starts by saying the Universe is absolute (where c has a maximum but can slow down in gravity), and only in cases of measurements involving inertial frames, *observation is relative* subject to Lorentz transformations. No observer need be present in GR - who is going to measure the speed of a light ray, Ray, as it curves around the Sun? We can simply apply what we know of the dynamics of deceleration and curvature in classical physics."
Right. But if one is going to propose a non-symmetric field theory one had better prepare to meet the same challenges that Einstein tried to overcome in his failed version ("The relativistic theory of the asymmetric field"). You seem to be using the term "observer" as a conscious agent -- physicists don't generally assign that meaning; observation refers to the interaction between a measuring apparatus (which could mean human observer but doesn't have to) and the source of the measurement.
"Being a speculative forum what is wrong with considering a new starting point and building on it from there one notion at a time?"
Not a thing! And I didn't mean to say or imply such; it's why I declined to offer a step-by-step critique of your framework. I know that your idea is all of a piece -- " ... a dynamic universal lattice where energy is transmitted locally from node to node at a maximum of c but at slower speeds when the nodes have greater potential as in a gravitational field." That's completely plausible, as is Garret Lisi's lattice-based E8 theory. Mathematicians don't deal in physical plausibility, however -- we are concerned with the abstractions (theorems, arguments, domain and range) that explain why this particular physics is preferred over any other equally plausible explanation.
So go forth and be imaginative! That's what makes life worth living, isn't it? And no one needs anyone else's permission, or a license, to do it.
Tom