Dear Paul,
Splendidly written essay! It seems obvious after reading it that entanglement, and not locality, should be the crux of the matter, but I never thought of it in exactly this way before.
1. An obvious naïve question is why, then, the "elementary" fermions do in fact have half-integer values. This would be obvious for any particular particle, but maybe not so clear why it should always be true.
2. It seems like the experiment you suggest on page 8 involving deuteron ions ought to be easily doable. Is there some technical difficulty associated with this that I'm unaware of? If not, are there any plans to do such an experiment?
3. I wonder if there is some deep representation-theoretic principle at stake here?
4. Relaxation of the "extra conditions" (Lorentz invariance, locality) imposed in regard to Pauli's version of the spin-statistics theorem is of particular interest to me. Explaining why is a long story... suffice it to say that reinterpretations of these conditions are central to my own speculative ideas about fundamental physics. If you're interested, you're welcome to read my essay here!
I enjoyed reading your work. Good luck in the contest, and take care,
Ben Dribus