Yup, no need to apologise. If nothing else the conversations get archived where other people can use them to get up to speed faster. A lot of these discussions get spread across forums, lists and IRC so it can be hard to know what the current state of the art thinking is.

Recall the second prong of my opening argument - if you could beat ASICs, you'd end up with botnets. I prefer having the chain be dominated by a single pool for a while than having one with a major botnet presence, given their history of doing things like mining empty blocks and giving random people enormous electricity bills.

I think we can make good head way if we just optimise a lot and finish things off, to be honest. I'm not sure we need an algorithmic silver bullet. Remember you can always outsource mining by just not having any hardware at all, CEX style, so trying to prevent outsourcing using clever hacks seems ultimately doomed.