Michael
Brilliant essay, and an area I believe far more research funds should go to. Not my area, but I've always studied progress on it avidly, and often find parallels, which I certainly do with yours. I understand your falsification/peer review problem as I've had the same and only now a first one accepted for review. I suspect you're only low in the community rankings due to your free thinking and non 'central' (to here) subject matter. You've certainly got a top mark from me.
I liked your root M as a fundamental. It needs some thought. I didn't absorb whether or not you had a view on the big bang, and suspected it may have been more just a touchstone, but I've recently explored some logical conclusions of my own model (which is also falsifiable), and they point to a recycled universe. I'm interested in more details of the basis of you 11Bn year figure as mine tends more towards 15. (These derivations are not in my essay, but there are links in the strings to an 'implications' paper).
Your reference to octaves also struck a chord (relevant jest!). Indeed Christian Corda is currently considering a paper rejected by mainstream focussing on just that, but ref em waves, harmonics and diffraction, related to my discrete field model (DFM).
I do hope you can read my essay (2020 vision means neither of our theories will probably be recognised before 2020!). http://fqxi.org/community/forum/topic/803 It takes high conceptual visualisation skills to see the simple solution to resolving the paradoxes of relativity. Our brains are just not developed enough to readily handle the number of dynamic variables required. I suspect you may see it (present rate about 1 in 5), but you'd need to read it slowly not skim it. I hope you like it I need all the high scores I can get! Do ask any questions.
Very best of luck, with the essay and your future research.
Peter