How about a completely time-based difficulty adjustment with a much smaller range and a comparatively smaller adjustment scope. Perhaps a daily difficulty adjustment by a maximum factor of 0.5 instead of 4?
I pledge 2BTC to whoever makes an i0coin fork with this implemented. (and has a much higher starting difficulty) Heck, if this were done right then the countdown for people to start mining would be automatic! Everyone would just wait and start mining when the difficulty was low enough.