I want a solution which can give me something approaching the confidence I have in precious metals under times of stress.

I say that when (not if) there is another financial crisis of the type which (according to legend) incited Satoshi, and it cannot be controlled with bail-outs and such, it is a near certainty that alternates to whatever solution we are funneled into will be attacked vigorously.  This includes gold and Bitcoin.

I say that these attacks are nearly certain to include pressure on corporate internet infrastructure providers and leveraging of the monitoring framworks known to be available to entities such as our NSA.

You seem to be saying that such things are entirely fanciful.  I disagree and I simply cannot bet as much as I would like on a solution which does not have the potential to defend itself against such things.  Bitcoin with it's 1MB/block cap has this potential, but only barely by my systems analysis and the available technologies and geopolitical landscapes as I understand them.

I want a value core that is as defensible as possible, and I want it to be Bitcoin because BTC is all that I own at this time.  I'll fight for it as long as there is hope then I'll switch to something else if we lose this battle.

If XT is so great, it should be great as a sidechain.  I honestly hope that it gets your 'critical mass' and 'outruns regulation' but I'm certainly not betting my BTC stash on it.  In fact I'll work toward this because I'm happy to use such a solution for whatever I can.  I already leverage the 'kindness' of various mega-players who give me nice toys for 'free', and XT seems like it would be a shoe-in for such use.  Hopefully you guys are porting the XT 'upgrades' to your btcd as we speak, and hopefully the hooks to make the XT protocol a sidechain will be easy and freely available to you.