While I agree with some of your statements and assertions, your conclusion and proposed solution is flawed. Yes, the founding fathers distrusted standing armies and envisioned the 2nd Amendment as a remedy for this. However, some of the founding fathers felt the entire bill of rights as superfluous as the constitution already granted sovereignty to the people, not the elected government. By extension, the notion that there should be a "well armed militia" instead of a standing army is also a contradiction IF (caps on purpose) the army reports to the people. I have no idea how that would be accomplished in practice, but I do know that the order of soap box to ballot box to ammo box is that way for a reason. Power determines the course of civilizations and national and international politics. Money and guns equal power and the federal government started out with neither. Alexander Hamilton provided money to the feds and they use it expertly to influence supposedly sovereign states to bend to their will in small and large ways. Ultimately, it was as you pointed out, the standing army that secured the federal government as the prominent power in our federalism experiment.
Now here is where your conclusion is flawed. Power cannot be taken without power. It can certainly be given up, but that is an idealistic dream. There is not one single case of that ever happening to a nation state without the threat of greater power forced upon it. Machiavelli was right that it is better to be feared than loved and we are proving it again in the USA. The problem is not having guns (power), it's having too many and allowing them to be used for things that they shouldn't be used for. England is an example of what I consider too far to one extreme -- where only hunters are allowed guns and even the police don't regularly carry firearms. I'm not a flag-waiving NRA member, but I do believe that we must uphold the laws of the land, which includes the 2nd amendment. I also believe the US is too far to the other extreme with a militarized police force with too-lax provisions in place to allow them to kill citizens. The founding fathers provided checks and balances at the highest levels of government and I believe this model should be followed down to the lowest levels. If power is the problem, then balancing it is the solution.
Instead of giving up power (guns), we should re-think how guns are distributed and used. I like the Israeli model, where all citizens are trained in the military, possess weapons and know how to use them properly. Their crime rate is famously low for a reason (terrorism aside). My proposal would be to require training for all gun owners (to encourage safe and sensible use), prohibit military weapons or tactics to be used by the police and to return to a state of balance. I could go into greater detail, but I'm neither a lawmaker or policy influencer -- just an armchair philosphizer.