This is excellent information, I appreciate it and your time! There are some misconceptions regarding how empty blocks come to be and without some general education we won't be able to facilitate change needed to squelch them.
Finally addendum: SPV mining isn't the *sole* cause of 1tx blocks. But it's the main cause of them. Some pools with poorly made/slow pool software, or slow hardware, might send out a pre-baked work template without any transactions when their node sees a new block because it takes their pool more time to actually build a new block with transaction. They are still relying on their full node seeing and validating a block, but are shortcutting the time it takes to build work in order to make sure they update to the newest block as fast as possible.
I know BTC Guild and ckpool didn't suffer from this. That might be because BTC Guild and ckpool used low level (C and C++) languages. The time difference in building/pushing out work for an empty block and building/pushing out work for a block with 500-900kb of transactions was negligible for BTC Guild.