I agree with pretty much all of what you said. It's an amazing brain teaser how the person falling across an event horizon would feel nothing (as far as science

I agree with pretty much all of what you said. It's an amazing brain teaser how the person falling across an event horizon would feel nothing (as far as science knows) and yet some observer far away watching it happen would see that it takes 'forever' to happen (time stops). Like QM itself, General Relativity has some 'contradictions' built in, related to observability. Despite the contradictions, I agree with Susskind that the 'surface' of BHs might be where the interesting stuff happens, and that the singularity itself might not even 'exist' except as some endpoint boundary condition of oscillations like an end of a guitar string, that's interacting with everything yet contains nothing.