Eternally five years away? No, batteries are improving under your nose

Cross licensing definitely had a part in it. Some of that was necessity, either practical or contractual. In the 70s, before Projection Masking as a fabrication technique came into play, more complex designs could have yields as bad as 10%.

As a result, 'Second Sourcing' was more frequent, and while Intel and AMD had some Cross Licensing before x86, the main reason the agreement expanded to include x86 was because IBM was still requiring Second Sources in the 80s.

I know at one point, Chevron had it's tentacles on some NIMH patents via their control of Ovonics. Not sure if there are/were any similar situations for Lithium Ion technology.

Also the price fixing done by Lithium companies between 2000-2011. That likely hampered adoption and perhaps improvements.

The inefficiency inclusion from the generator for electric is somewhat unrelated to an ICE. No ones including the inefficiency of extracting and refining the oil, the huge amounts of time/energy required within the earths crust to create the oil, nor the energy conversion from the sun into organic matter in the first place. It seems a lot of the details on the fossil fuel side get left out.

Discharge efficiency varies from battery to battery. Generally speaking, it's a 90+% efficient process (as is charging). However, there are certainly exceptions which are more or less efficient.

Transmission costs probably eat a bigger portion of EV total efficiency. Those depend on how far you are from your power source and what voltage your power is transmitted at.

That said, a thing EVs do that ICEs can't is accept power from any source. That means that only a fraction of the fuel is actually generated from a fossil fuel.

One other thing to consider is that as power density goes up for batteries, the amount of required batteries go down, ultimately reducing vehicle weight and improving range.

Assuming batteries were ever 10x their current power density, you'd probably not see cars with 10x range, rather, you'd see something like 400mile range cars with the same total power capacity of yesteryear cars. Pretty much all because you've cut the pack weight down by 1/10th (probably less because you need a lot less infrastructure around maintaining temperature for 1/10th the number of batteries).

Also the ability to recover kinetic energy during braking which is lost with ICE engines.

I wouldn't say you would really count battery discharge efficiency, usually a batteries energy density will be how much useful energy you get out on discharge so it already accounts for charge/discharge efficiency.

Same with electrical generation with generators or whatever. One of the best things about BEV even if run off fossil fuels is that power plants don't care to much about space or weight, they can do multiple levels of heat recovery and whatever emissions controls and get higher thermal efficiency with lower emissions and all that complicated gear is not being carried around in your car nor maintained by you. On top of that now you are decoupled from energy source so changing fuel oil to natural gas or mixing solar, wind or nuclear doesn't change your vehicle.

Most of the energy of combustion is wasted through heat loss. One way to increase efficiency would be a secondary system that harnesses the heat output.

Is weight distribution really helpful for anything other than handling?

Just have to figure out how to make it cost less than other energy sources.

Nuclear is already incredibly safe. Installing solar has probably killed more people than nuclear ever has.

My understanding is currently they just grind up the old batteries into a kind of slurry that then goes through a uniform series of processes to recover the various components.

Who's arguing? You or experts?