Such an unreal amount of work just to go to some event! I'm glad you are sticking to your cause area of helping animals. Worst case, we animal advocates can learn from EA how to do effective work and take it into our realm. You story and sacrifice is inspiring, and I'm glad I randomly ran into you at ALC this year!
Maybe I'm too ignorant on the subject, but I fail to understand how anything rewritten here means we need to change what is happening today in the pro-animal world. I understand wanting to caution against being hyper-focused on short term wins that we lose out on potential long term wins, but posts like this always leave the hard part out. Which is, namely, what changes from our current movement? You leave that up to the reader as an exercise. I find it difficult to take too seriously those with say we need loftier goals without specifying how to get there.
In the animal rights world, we attack the problem of speciesism in a variety of ways. While it is an assumption (and you admit this at the start), I fail to see how continuous small victories attacking the problem from multiple angles over time does not amount to an overall societal shift in our perspective of how we treat animals.
All that said, you talking about funding and this is an EA form, not total liberation form. So if you are suggesting funders should be more open to what they fund, then I'm on board.