Agreed again. I'm still dazzled that after all the fanfare and hoopla over instant runoff voting in the early 2000s that nothing changed. Note, dazzled !== surprised, but still.
As for parties, I change parties multiple times a year to get the best possible vote I can. Sometimes that means I'm voting for a particular candidate, or set of policies, but sometimes also simply against... and yes, it would completely disqualify us for any public position that couldn't be voted into as an Independent.
I wonder what it would take for the issue to get real traction though, as the more and more polarized American society becomes, the more entrenched the two party system feels. Any fracturing of the system is certain to benefit somebody disproportionally at first, and it seems like the timetable for actually making a real push towards it would take longer than the state of public opinion, so nobody moves towards it because nobody knows who will get the advantage by the time it happens.
If we accept that the two party system wishes to perpetuate itself, second only to a more monolithic one-party system, then the conclusion seems foregone, but perhaps I'm just being pessimistic. Either way, the parties themselves have shown resistance to warring factions within the party, despite how much they both claim to prefer a competition of ideas.