To answer one of your questions (maybe the most important, emphasis mine):
So in all practicality, the more specialized the mining gets, the less people can actually start mining, which is contrary to Bitcoin's design.
Even if the ASICs get really cheap, Bitcoin will adjust difficulty to compensate, in a sense, and you'll have to buy a lot of them again.
-kmeisthax
60% down this page (at the time of this post anyway):
http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1ato45/because_rbitcoin_could_use_some_contrary_opinion/That reduced quote was what I was interested to see if the trend could be reversed... a design that was so efficient and widely available it was still possible to mine for the masses (as all you could do is multiply at the same efficiencies).
I was unaware they were simply parallel operations rather than solving them quicker. Still, it would be interesting to see if you can solve that operation quicker, rather than in parallel.