Is the entire thing still hinged on the fact that it fails if the algo becomes optimized by over 2x speedup on specialized hardware to create identical pool centralization?
No.
The PoW doesn't need to be done on the payer's hardware. Payer (or payee) can pay a miner to do the PoW. The decentralized control (of which chain to mine on and which validators to trust & statistically verify) still resides with those paying for the PoW.
I do put a lot of effort into making a new hash that can't be optimized well on ASICs. So that everyone can get near equal access to efficient hardware. I think I have improved on Cryptonote's hash function. I wish I had more time to evaluate tromp's and other asymmetric hash functions (should probably buy tromp a Kill-A-Watt meter).
Even if you believe it's possible to create such a thing, the fact that you need to launch the coin and have it exist for years before the answer is readily apparent makes it a very unattractive target for adoption
If I succeed on marketing and implementation, the people adopting and mining the coin won't have any idea about crypto currency nor mining. This is a very big challenge and I don't want anyone to expect anything. The chance of failure is much greater than the chance of success. But I am not asking any of you to take the risk with me. Hopefully if by the time you hear about it, it is because it will already be successful and it spread by word-of-mouth back to the forum.
because at any time the fundamentals can just completely disappear when some guy like Wolf slightly optimizes the hashing function...
By that time, it won't help Wolf, because the hashrate and unprofitability will be too great. If you are going to attack, you have to do it early near launch.
The flaw in my design, is the network doesn't spend more on security than makes sense for the value of the transactions on the network. So it requires the transactions to scale up significantly in order to have high security. A predominately HODL-er coin can't use my design. Thus Bitcoin could not use my design.
Also my design centralizes validation. But that is okay because every crypto currency ends up with centralized validation and control, as it scales up. At least my design keeps the control decentralized at any scale of transactions.
In another thread, both Smooth and I seemed to feel this more traditional PoW-mail, send your own transactions approach would be the Occam's Razor solution for Satoshi and already would have been explored if it was viable. Instead, Bitcoin went the more Rube Goldberg approach because the other methods weren't deemed feasible.
The NSA and the Deep State who created Bitcoin wanted a centralizing algorithm. They wanted the powerlaw distribution of wealth to be in control. Never would they actually want one-computer, one-vote. They put propaganda like that in the Bitcoin white paper to fool us.