His proposal involves allocating roughly half of Satoshi's untouched coins to seed the new network and fund early insiders

Incorrect, it gives satoshi half the coins on * a new network * he did not create, as a gift.
It's the opposite of shitcoin tokenomics with hidden or complicated vesting mechanisms because it is a onetime public allocation everyone knows about and do not mind because the rest of the network will be so useful, inherit Core, all past and future bitcoin properties or advancements, and much more, and leave their personal stake untouched.

Personally I think there does need to be change, but levelling that with the cries of don't tinker with it makes for an unwinnable outcome, which again leads to inaction

then you support drivechains and ecash because it will ossifi and reduce L1 size moving changes to L2 's which will be adopted based on their market demand by fee paying users.
What you want is what we all, and any rational user wants, and is exactly what ecash will do and what bitcoin could do tomorrow with CUSF if not for the real infection in this culture.

Spark is an infection

wrong. Spark and other centralizing technologies are the only possible outcomes given the constraints of LN design. It may be dressed up in different ways over the years, the BDSM leather of LSP's the sexy nurse lingerie of Spark, but at the end of the day a pig in lipstick is still a pig

I didn't become an eCasher lol

you are an ecasher and not a bitcoiner because you are thinking and not stuck in the priors of a cult formed before you were even interested in crypto. Like most Religion if you come from a non religious background, all religions appear mutually nonsensical. Suddenly being thrown into one leaves you confused at why they all hate eachother for mildly different versions of their sky daddy.
The more a country or project moves away from fanatical doctrine, the wealthier they become, because creativity and wealth are to be found in the pluralist zone between extremes. Unlike Bitcoin right now (without CUSF), eCash scales and so you will be an ecasher the day some bodega you shop at is using a sovereign high throughput ecash based app that they may not even know is ecash, whether you know it or not either.
These technical arguments and debates will fade into the background, the way no one argues over the merits of A/C versus D/C current anymore or goes around killling elephants with electricity in public displays to show the dangers.
This was always the mission of bitcoin.

PEER TO PEER CASH

As Paul has described, Bitcoin culture in 2016 to 2026 is like a country where the people do this weird thing of sacrificing their children and then complaining about their declining population. Along comes someone who say's "Hey, you don't need to do that." and then there is ten years of debate about whether its good to kill these children anymore, and if its really the cause of the declining population (adoption). Lightning is like this country responding, "What if instead of killing the children, we break all their legs instead?!". Progress....but not really.

For centuries in India, they did animal sacrifices, but then non theist movements like Jainism and Buddhism emerged, and various substitution rituals spread where the sacrificial victim, the goat or whatever, no longer needed to be killed to appease the deity, it just needed to see the pole it would have been attached to and killed from, had they not stopped doing that.

Based on technical merits, all the arguments against Drivechains, opcodes, soft forks over the years have been this stupid and ecash/CUSF are the substitute ceremonies that stop killing the children or breaking the legs, and release bitcoin to take over the world.