Hi Jonathan,
I am glad you put in the effort to get a good understanding. Getting to a symmetric balance in the derivatives is the main thing. All else falls from that. This is quite obscure stuff which can get complicated, but ultimately it comes down to ordinary real derivatives.
I am fairly sure this is a new take on quaternion derivatives and analyticity, but it would not surprise me to have reinvented the wheel in some other context. Actually, it would be great if a correspondence to the quaternion derivatives could be found in some existing formulation, possibly linking the two.
Your point about geometric examples is a good one. There must be a way to interpret the derivatives in terms of well-known geometric algebra, but I will have to set this project aside for a while.
Another project has captured my attention. Rob McEachern put forward the idea (with a computer program as a demonstration) that quantum correlations are a result of sampling a process that can provide, at most, one bit of information per sample. I stumbled upon a faster way to produce the correlations using a similar Monte Carlo method, which also requires a large number of trials to accumulate statistics. It is easily verified that McEachern's one-bit criterion is satisfied. Bell correlations are produced matching the theoretical sinusoid to about 1% accuracy. Second paper will be posted on vixra hopefully by the end of the month. It turns out that there is a way to speed the procedure up by replacing Monte Carlo statistics by easily calculated probabilities. The CHSH test verifies that the procedure is classical, but there is a simple way to nearly reproduce the quantum expectation for CHSH. Here is my original paper on the subject, which includes links to Rob's work. I have a feeling that that this is fundamentally related to QM, but it is also interesting for its potential in simulations.
You have an impressive base of knowledge, Jonathan, and I really appreciate your feedback.
All the best to you,
Colin