Anyway - enough wispy bullshit -- Is there a solution I'm missing, or one in the works? Or should I just suck it up, quit my bitching, and download Electrum?
I am afraid that any remedy will only push out your timeline running a full node a few months or a year.
You will have to decide to be in the business of running a full node, that will become as serious as it is now to be a mining pool operator,
or you move your bitcoin with most of the customer to a tablet.
Above statements are not ideological, just rational thinking.
I also regret that times of all having equal "vote" will be gone. They are actually already gone. A mining pool operator has more than equal "vote" compared to your full node since long, e.g. he can exclude transactions from blocks, you do not. You will hardly win a real world argument against blockchain.info with a merchant remote from you by pointing to your screen.
I work on an implementation that aims to support creation trustworthy centralized services, unlock innovation so we preserve as much of the the zero trust environment as possible. The future will unlikely be a homogenous set of nodes, since it is not already.
Peter works on a short term remedy with 0.8 for us.