Those are good suggestions dlightman!
What is your level of interest? You are obviously quite knowledgable so I hope you stick around and contribute to this coin!
I'm going to stick with the CryptoNight Lite experiment for now and see how it goes. I expect this coin to be in an active development phase for some time with a number of necessary hard forks so if things don't work out we can always change it.
I'm an angel of common sense
99% of forum members are very far from understanding many important details. They can't "verify signatures" but have to trust instead (light-client model in social communication). This is dangerous in case we talk about privacy. I can't promise to read the thread but you can ping me with PM.
It will be very interesting to see details about relative CPU / GPU performance of light version and native C++/asm hash rate on actual embedded CPU.
Hardfork is possible only in case people agree with. It's easy to change PoW with low hashrate network. Later there will be a lot of miners against because they already invested into HW. Bitcoin is the best example.