As far as the tapering, I feel it's necessary to preserve the yin-yang aspect and prevent the logo from degenerating into a typical logo.
I can see your point but I'm not totally sold that the untapered yin yang is really the better one. Maybe it could be more perfect it there's an even better curvature on the ends. Not sure. Don't get me wrong, it's not bad, but to me it's very debatable which one is better, the tapered or the untapered one.
Yin yang is pushing the limits and I don't know why a more conservative approach is worse.
All we know is we got to retain the ae, lose the gift bow tie association, maybe have a noticable 8, and the tapering is in question.
Do you want a prestigious logo or do you want an artistic mishmash of (too) many concepts?