Unfortunately, the teams at Valve and Oculus seemed unaware that solving the problems you cited would require "re-engineering the human body", and naively set about solving these problems with more conventional engineering methodologies. Miraculously, they've succeeded in eliminating simulator sickness, taking advantage of the near-zero pixel switching time of OLED displays, as well as accurate, low-latency, 6DOF head tracking.

Current state-of-the-art VR tech is a huge advancement from late 90s VR tech, here's a few examples that run contrary to your curious assertion that the only significant VR tech advance of the last decade was the transition from CRT to LED displays:

-The usual inexorable orders-of-magnitude march toward greater processing power

-Commodification of smartphone hardware, which happens to be ideal for VR

-The ability to correct for distortion and chromatic aberration in software, rather than with bulky and complex optics

-Advancements in "sensor fusion", where multiple, complementary tracking sensor technologies are used in tandem, to compensate for deficiencies in any single tracking tech

-Low persistence technology that eliminates notoriously sim-sickness-inducing pixel smearing

You've clearly done your reading on this, but the VR landscape really has changed more in the last few months than the five years pre-Oculus.