I agree Liquid isn't open or permissionless enough, i never used Liquid either. Alternatively, you could check Rootstock (
https://www.rsk.co/) which have smart contract capability. It's less promoted than Liquid, but AFAIK it's more open and use merged mining on Bitcoin network.
I'll note that. I knew this won't be easy by any means, but it seems horribly hard. I'll need to research a lot more than I thought, but I still like the idea. I need to talk to some friends. Thanks for some first impressions!
Bitcoin community generally not interested with smart contract or other usage with high complexity, so it's not surprising you have hard time. But after short research (thanks to this thread), i found out RSK already support token, although there are few information/documentation about it.