Have you guys looked at Cuckoo cycle?
FWIW we evaluated Cuckoo as well for Zcash, and it was a strong second-place contender. There wasn't really anything wrong with it it just didn't seem to have quite as much of a rigorous scientific analysis as Equihash. However, that is a very subjective thing for me to say. You could argue (and Cuckoo's author, John Tromp, does argue persuasively) that Cuckoo's history of analysis and refinement is better than Equihash's.
What about cycling through 10 unique PoWs every 10 blocks?
I'm not the best at discrete analysis and understand this multiplies attack surface 10-fold, but could we splinter miners into small, specialized, and de-fanged factions using 10 different well-chosen hash algorithms, then scatter them among CPUs/GPUs/FPGAs/ASICs?
Block 1 JH
Block 2 Skein
Block 3 Groestl
Block 4 Cuckoo
Block 5 Keccak
Block 6 Equihash
Block 7 BLAKE2
Block 8 SCrypt
Block 9 CryptoNight
Block 10 Ethash
Let's change PoW so that anyone with moderate amount of capital can attack us, sounds like a great idea!
Agreed. You can hate ASICs, but they do provide a very robust network, very expensive to attack. Change of PoW would do more harm than good.
Right now, to attack Bitcoin you only need to bamboozle Jihan. Not very expensive.
If Bitcoin is in danger due to such an attack, it's nice to have fully prepared contingency plans ready to deploy.
But the socioeconomic consensus will allow Roger and Jihan to initiate aggression before it reacts with overwhelming retaliatory force.