Dear Peter,
I enjoyed your essay immensely. Your remark that "time increases local bonds and resistance to motion" seem to be directed to architectural pilings, but is a wonderful metaphor for physics, as I'm sure you intended.
You begin by noting that "calling time fundamental or 'absolute' fails with special relativity", but then point out that Einstein stressed one needs to keep searching for a 'heuristic' logic rationale for SR. I discuss this problem in my essay, which I hope you will read. The 'simple action' may be as simple as realizing that Einstein's ubiquitous clocks actually count cycles and measure energy directly, and time only indirectly.
I like your discussion of linear motion and rotation. "No 'particle' could even exist without its spin motion. Any motion through the continuum may creat the vortices we find in all larger scale fluids." Of course this gravito-magnetic circulation is built-in to Einstein's weak-field equations, and hence implicit in all gravitational field equations, reinforcing the understanding of the field as a perfect fluid.
Your discussion of length contraction as Doppler and of c+v as fields moving within fields, with no violation of c, is compatible with my essay.
Finally, you recall Einstein's "we should be able to explain physics to a barmaid" is valid; barmaids are not bothered with strong beliefs in false premises. Physicists must first get beyond this before even considering alternative concepts. Some can, some can't. As you note
"Deep familiarity with complex (if incompatible or flawed) theory may then dissuade many from adopting new unfamiliar concepts, even, or particularly, if ridiculously simple."
It is ridiculously simple to understand and confirm that atomic clocks measure energy directly, and time only indirectly. The substitution of energy-time conjugation for space-time symmetry in SR retains all relativistic particle physics while rejecting the paradoxes associated with space-time symmetry (a.k.a. 'no preferred frame') and the 'railroad "gedanken" experiments'. Of course 20th century physics is based in relativistic particle physics, while none of the 'railroad' logic has any relevance to real physics.
I believe our essays support each other in SR aspects. I hope you find this so.
My best regards,
Edwin Eugene Klingman