I think you've nailed it. That's essentially the solution I've been in favor of for years (although I like the idea of local government ownership, but that should at least be an option in your "LoopCo" plan). The ILECS (and cable co's) are a major obstacle--how can you have effective competition when the existing last mile connections are owned by monopolies and the barrier to entry for new competition is essentially infinitely high: no municipality is going to give carte blanche to dig up all the streets to lay out fiber (and don't think that wireless can solve all those problems, either).

If his code (or even the compiled software) is available, it might be useful for creating a digital elevation model which could be used to fill in the voids in the SRTM elevation data.