Hi Royce,
You wrote:
"In cosmology, dark matter has not been identified, dark energy (the accelerated expansion of the universe) and inflation are unexplained, galactic haloes remain unverified, the concept of super-symmetry has been discredited, and the "flatness problem" and why omega is exactly 1 remain unresolved."
I appreciate that you are taking up some of the unsolved problems of observational cosmology, as I have so far found few essayists who have. I very much like your account of how it all could have gotten started.
In my essay I take a different approach to these problems, but with the same end in mind, to explore a new concept for cosmology. Perhaps in Software Cosmos you will find something of a kindred soul who questions today's dominant paradigm, even though I start from a different perspective (the simulation model) and come to the opposite conclusion, It from Bit.
Looking at both I can see how our two accounts might naturally co-exist, as your initial state seems (to me anyway) analogous to a software structure initialized to all zeros.
Hugh