Hi Sean,
As far as I'm aware of, the universe either has been created by some outside intervention or it creates itself out of nothing, without any such interference. If in the last analysis in a self-creating universe particles have to create themselves, each other, then we cannot avoid the conclusion that particles, particle properties, like their mass, must be as much the cause as the effect of their interactions, of forces between them, never mind Higgs. This means that a force cannot be either attractive or repulsive, always, agreeing with Newton's action = reaction law which says that a force never can be stronger or weaker than the counter force it is able to evoke. As Spring Theory starts from the assumption that particle properties only are the cause of interactions, forces, i.e. that a force either is attractive or repulsive, it cannot ever unify forces but instead is part of the problem itself: of the classical idea that the mass of particles is an unchangeable, intrinsic, privately owned quantity, an absolute, interaction/observation-independent property, something which but for practical difficulties can be measured even from without the universe.
This same misunderstanding has led to the belief that the Planck constant is the minimum energy quantum, the Planck length the minimum distance in the universe. If in blackbody radiation there are more energy levels per unit energy interval at higher energies so we need more decimals to distinguish successive energy levels at higher energies, then the energy gap between subsequent levels can become arbitrarily small: though energy is quantified, there is no minimum limit to the size of the quantum. The Planck constant h then is like the number 1 in arithmetic: 0.5 < 1 < 1.5. If we can measure h more accurately, add another decimal at a higher energy, then we can write that number as 0.95 < 1.0 < 1.05. So if in our equations we again set h = 1, then every time we improve its accuracy by another decimal, we increase the magnifying power of our microscope with a factor 10. In other words, the extent to which spacetime is defined, detailed somewhere, depends on the local energy density, so space is not built from discrete unit volumes which have the same minimum size everywhere, 'cells' which contain the same energy, which would lead to an absurd high zero-point energy. The higher the energy density somewhere, the more detailed spacetime is, the greater the physical difference (observed lengths of rods, pace of clocks) is between adjacent positions, whereas the farther from masses, the emptier spacetime is, the less positions over a larger area differ physically to a massive observing (test) particle. So the Planck constant and Planck length have no special significance whatsoever. Indeed: ''A ''meter" doesn't have any meaning on its own unless it is compared against the length of another object''. So the fact that the meter, second, gram and joule aren't defined outside the universe means that the size of any energy or length quantum must be relative, an interaction/observation-dependent quantity, and hence the mass of objects, so the flaw of GR is that it isn't relative enough.
In the seemingly innocuous assumption of Big Bang Cosmology that we may regard the universe as an ordinary object which has particular properties as a whole, as an object which in its entirety changes in time, BBC unwittingly but implicitly asserts that there's something outside the of it the universe interacts with, owes its properties to: that it has been created by something outside of it. Evidently, this attitude can be justified only if particles would only be the cause of interactions, not if we have to concede that they also must be the product of their interactions. BBC, in the concept of cosmic time, if fact states that the universe lives in a time realm not of its own making. Though it is said that time only stars at the bang, if a universe can create itself, then it must always have been able to do so, in which case it cannot, as a whole, have a beginning: a beginning requires something with respect to which it begins. I'm afraid that never in the history of physics has there been a 'theory' which has wrought more havoc upon physics as the big bang tale. And, no, as I argue in my blog and 2012 FQXi essay, observations which are thought to prove that we live in a big bang universe are far less unequivocal than is assumed.
Regards, Anton