I am also on the astrometry.net mailing list and have been following your communications there with interest.
At present I’ve no real use for precision astrometry, using the plate solver only to find stars to within a few arcseconds which is plenty good enough for pointing a telescope and to enable APT to find a VS and its comparison sequence, then to do precision photometry.
On the odd occasion I do need good astrometry I use either Astrometrica, if it can be persuaded to work at all, or the IRAF tools.