Jim Hoover,
Thank you for reading my essay and for the interesting post. I plan on reading your essay soon.
You covered a lot of stuff in your post and you summarized a number of current new theories on the nature of quantum particles. To be honest, I don't personally cater much with far out suggestions such as 'many-worlds' where experimentation is not possible.
I spent much of my R & D career in the area of probability and stochastic processes. I became interested in quantum mechanics some 15 years or more ago when I read about the Copenhagen interpretation and Einstein's (EPR) paper on the incompleteness of the so-called wave function. It seems like the superposition-of-probabilities was being posited to be a real object in both time and space. I couldn't grasp the concept that a 'probability' could be a real object. To me, probabilities can only predict possible outcomes or events of future 'experiments' or 'measurements.' Future events aren't real, I don't think.
My favorite approach to QM is to consider all objects, no matter how small, to be real. To me, it's the internal physical characteristics of a particle that leads to its point-like and wave-like behavior as it interacts with other like particles or with other forces and objects.
I'm sorry for rambling.
I'm hoping that you cast a vot