Dear Neil Bates,
I enjoyed your wrestling with entanglement and realism. My own opinion is that physicists project math structure on the world and then come to believe that physical reality has that structure. 'Qubits' are a fine approximation for spins on magnetic domains, but the Stern-Gerlach data on the famous post card shows anything but qubits. Only because Bell insisted on qubits (A,B = +1,-1) in his first equation did he arrive at his no-go theorem. If one uses 3D spin one obtains exactly the correct correlation, but this offends many believers in structure.
Of course, although Bell's reasoning was based on Stern-Gerlach, all of the experiments have been done with photons. I have not worked out a comparable solution, because, like you apparently, I do not fully understand the "exotic quirks like orbital angular momentum".
You mentioned an 'atavistic resurgence of determinism', but many authors (like Flavio) question the simplistic determinism of classical physics, as do I. In your bio you express interest in the mind-body problem. My essay, Deciding on the nature of time and space, has been updated to handle info that appeared 10 days ago that you may find interesting in this regard. I invite you to read it and welcome any remarks.
Best regards,
Edwin Eugene Klingman