Hector,
You have it all right, but you miss the reason why it is proving so difficult to accept and model. We, as individual points of reference, experience time as a sequence of events and so it becomes a vector from past to future, but the underlaying reality is that change is causing future potential to become past circumstance. For example, it isn't the earth traveling some dimension from yesterday to tomorrow, but that tomorrow becomes yesterday because the earth rotates. Just as we see the sun moving across the sky, but the actual reality is this it is us moving the other way.
This was the subject of my Questioning the Foundations entry.
Physics only enforces the illusion by reductionistically treating it as a measure of duration, ie. past to future. As effect of action, ie. measure of change, time is similar to temperature. Time is to temperature what frequency is to amplitude.
As you point out, duration doesn't transcend the present, but is the activity occurring between measuring events, so it is not a vector encompassing past and future.
Different clocks run at different rates for the very clear reason you mention; They are separate actions. The cat is not both dead and alive because it is the actual course of events that determine its fate, as future potential collapses into past circumstance. Just as there could be ten winners before a race, but only one after it.
If time were a vector from past to future, wouldn't the faster clock move into the future more rapidly, but, as you mention, due to the thermodynamic activity, it ages/burns quicker and thus recedes into the past more rapidly.
I would think most people would find this interesting, but since narrative and linear logic are based on the temporal sequence, it calls into question the very essence of what makes us human and for most people, that is just sand in their gears. So we have all sorts of physics nonsense, as physicists focus on the static logic of math and not the dynamic processes of real physics.
My current essay covers aspects of this.
Regards,
John Merryman