Dr. Kadin
I apologize for not having yet commented on your essay, I am woefully behind!
I agree with you that seriously reconsidering quantum theory is drawing much less attention in this FQXi contest than it should be - it is as if it is the assumption that still cannot be questioned, even when all other assumptions are up for grabs! My essay makes a rather more serious challenge to the assumptions of quantum theory than is perhaps initially apparent, and proceeds to show that QT isn't fundamental as its mathematical form can be derived by a change in mathematical representation.
It is not just us essay contestants who are encountering problems challenging the assumption of quantum theory. Joy Christian's work shows that Bell's theorem doesn't prove that QT has no replacement - which effectively seems to me to amount to a proof that QT isn't fundamental - and has been getting serious stick, as opposed to being ignored. My essay outlines a totally independent proof of the same thing. In strict physics terms this opens the door to seriously questioning the status of QT, and hopefully this may happen before the end of the contest.
I think your closing lines nicely capture what's gone wrong with physics:
"Generations of physicists have been educated to ignore physical intuition about the paradoxes, while focusing on mathematics divorced from physical pictures. In response, the field of theoretical physics became more mathematically abstract, straying far from its origins explaining the behavior of real objects moving in real space."
Incidentally, the same is also true of general relativity, which has become something of a mathematical map detached from its physical territory - a trend which looks as though it is set to get a lot worse with notions of emergent dimensions.
Michael