I agree with you that mining centralization is a problem that needs fixing. But PoW cannot be abandoned, because the only way to create value as a measure of GDP must come at the expense of GDP. This truth has been reinforced for thousands of years and I'm doubtful that some clever programming will ever change it. Satoshi's solutions were innovative, but they also didn't violate any rules of the universe.

BTW: AnonyMint hinted that a solution to centralized mining could be to somehow make mining always unprofitable, that way all mining comes from individual nodes contributing miniscule amounts of hashpower while their wallets are open.

I also agree with you 100% that tx fees will not sustain miners when block rewards vanish. I have talked about this a lot in other threads. Again, this is not a problem with PoW, only with bitcoin's implementation of it. It is the myth of the finite money supply. Block rewards don't have to vanish as new coins can be minted on demand as long as GDP is expended in the process. But this is a discussion for another thread.

Regarding innovation: The point I was trying to make was that one coin that devotes all it's resources to perfecting one innovation (i.e. XMR with anonymity) isn't necessarily worse than another coin that tries to tackle several. You and I obviously disagree on what we consider to be "important innovations". However, there's a huge demand for anonymous tech right now, and it's pretty clear that the XMR team wants to get it's flagship feature right before worrying about other bells and whistles.

Perhaps monero seems to be taking over the alt forums because it's been a very hot topic lately. Even if an XMR-specific forum were announced, I doubt XMR related threads and discussion would suddenly go away.