Very fun and thought-provoking speculations!

One question on your last comments:

“believe (or believe to hope) that there is something very simple out there that is waiting to be realized.”

When you say simple, do you mean something intuitive that is easy to understand, or do you mean something fundamental and basic that underpins all the laws of the universe that we can observe or test?

I think quantum mechanics is a perfect example of where things will go from here - that is something fundamental and basic that underpins much (but not all) of our observable world, but is extremely difficult to understand and is totally unintuitive.

The search for a unified theory of everything continues as I understand it, but the math and mind-bendingness just gets worse and worse for us regular folks, and intuition will never be part of it unfortunately.