I just had a Pulitzer Prize winning post all done up in response and inadvertently deleted it. Now you will have to put up with my regular writing.
Not to worry, I seem to have inadvertently left the Pulitzer with your name on it somewhere...
I sincerely hope you turn out to be right on an early collapse and that I am not right on a medium term collapse. I am certainly not against nor have I lost hope or I would not be here. But hope and magical thinking are not the same thing and many have lost sight of that. We need to keep dragging each other back to reality when someone drifts off into dreamland.
People (including you if memory serves, albeit with incomplete confidence on that point) do note that the longer you spend looking at these issues the more the collapse timeframe tends to widen out. Inasmuch as I have only really focused on them for slightly over 6 years, I don't yet have the width of perspective you would. So far I think events are proceeding slower than I would have thought they would - although I can also note large and fundamental changes that have occurred in those years.
It's reasonable to suspect I'll fall into the same category as many people who initially expect failure faster and sooner, by that token - and perhaps reality will be somewhere in the middle of where we're pitching views. That said, I'm withholding major adjustment of my views until 1. It becomes clearer if the more aggressive PIOMAS extrapolations are valid and 2. I get to see if the impacts on agriculture are as dire as I think they will be. The next few years should answer those points (or at least the first one).
I'm pretty confident we will see another iteration of collapse (similar to the Arab spring, but larger) soon - but what I have no grasp of is how many total iterations of collapse we should expect. It seems unreasonable to expect everything to go with the next one, even though I do think positive feedback effects ultimately apply.
My hopes for earlier collapse are similar to you in reasons - but I'm also hoping for a fairly rapid collapse (as I expect) as it's increasingly clear that gaining the capability to try to implement plans over a longer timeframe is likely to be difficult to say the least.
We have to make conscious decisions on a global basis to dramatically reduce population (a human impossibility in my opinion - please prove me wrong) or we need to find a way to get to collapse as quick as possible. I am in favor of nothing that extends the current paradigm in any way as it clearly leads to the worst possible disaster.
I actually personally think the key priority should be to raise the collapse floor and try to put in truly long term planning for a sustainable and ultimately civilised outcome.
The main reason I think that is that the population adjustment pretty much comes for free. We don't need to trigger it or cause it - nature will do it for us.
Long range planning for our species not only does not come for free, but virtually nobody thinks it worthwhile or will do it in the context of immediate and pressing major problems (people necessarily focus onto the short term in these situations). To me it is therefore the area of work more ultimately necessary?