i want them to make standard transactions so that they cannot be differentiated from any other ordinary transaction that is an actual transaction. so it needs to be in the utxo set. if they're not willing to put it into the utxo set then i'm not really a fan of them storing any type of data
Why do you think they won't be willing to put it into the UTXO set? What's the reasoning here? Aren't they evidently willing to throw millions in the bucket for their crap?
The situation is really simple, yet we've made it unnecessarily complicated. Users can inject arbitrary data whether you like it or not. They can do it either by inflating the UTXO set, or by merely touching it. At the moment, these users don't harm the set by creating an output for every 256-bit chunk their Ordinals weigh. If you invalidate this "less harmful solution", or make it non-standard, you're pushing them to do the most harmful for the rest of us solution.
What's so difficult to understand?