And yet, you are waving off potential answers because you are convinced there are none.

I agree with you, the cited papers probably don't solve the hard problem of consciousness but to assume that qualia is just intrinsically unexplainable won't help solve anything either.

I can imagine that consciousness will either turn out to be something completely groundbreaking (i.e. the universe consists of consciousness) or completely mundane (i.e. it's an illusion all sufficiently complex information processing systems develop), but ignoring research is not the way find out.