Great constructive criticism. I like it! Did you work in product design and development at some point?
Design? No. Development? Yes for at least the past 40 years.
However, most of the criticism you are getting from me comes from over 3 years of studying Bitcoin, participating in this discussion forum, and seeing some of these same "new ideas" repeated again, and again, and again.
To address your concerns, I must say that I am in no way shape or form qualified to even begin to provide a counterarguement. As a matter of fact, I am staring at the white paper trying to think of a way to somehow modify the way bitcoin works all together.
Then you are taking on a monumental task. The white paper was born out of decades of failed ideas. While there have been some very small variations on what is described in the white paper, there have (after 6 years of MANY people trying) not yet been any significant workable modifications to the basic concepts. You can't even start to come up with a workable idea until you understand what problems were encountered in the attempts prior to Bitcoin and how Bitcoin solves those problems.
It may just be best to start an entirely new algorithm and concept and not compare it to bitcoin, yet maintain a crypto currency standard of anonymization and public transactions, etc.
It is easy (trivial even) to implement a crypto currency with a centralized clearing house. But if you want to create something new truly decentralized from the ground up, then you need to understand concepts such as the byzantine generals problem and Sybil attacks. You need to understand why the blockchain concept is necessary and what it is accomplishing. You need to understand that EVERY node MUST assume that it is being lied to in every communication that it receives unless it can prove that it is not being lied to.