John,
    I agree with you, almost 100%. Perhaps the only place in which we differ is where you asked:

"Why is an in-depth knowledge of grammar so important that we are willing to preclude other important areas of language awareness in order to ensure that our students can break down every sentence into all of its components,
especially if they are already in complete productive and receptive (albeit
sub-conscious) control of  them, and most especially if we cannot agree on
how to do it amongst ourselves?"

Our point of disagreement here may be in "every sentence into all of its components," and we may not even disagree there. KISS makes the claim to enable students to explain "every word," and a complete study of KISS does do that, but not to the satisfaction of many of the people on this list. Consider, for example, the often discussed question (on this list) of phrasal verbs. This may be an important question for grammarians, but the pedagogical focus on it is silly. Consider, for example:

Put on your hat.

In KISS, you can consider "on" as part of the verb phrase (the linguists phrasal verb), or you can consider it as a preposition ― as long as you do not consider "on your hat" as the prepositional phrase, for the sentence means "Put on *your head* your hat. When I tried to explain this in the KISS manuscript, the NCTE reviewers immediately jumped to the grammarians' / linguists' position and claimed that "put on" is a phrasal verb. Their response suggests that they have probably never even tried to teach students to identify prepositional phrases in real texts. If they had, they would have noticed that many students would label "on your hat" as a prepositional phrase. The KISS explanations (two possibilities here) enables students to deal with the meaningful structure in a meaningful way. 

      "Every word?" Within KISS, this is possible, and I have found that most students want that ― if they have a clearly defined set of terms. The number of concepts that they need is not really that great. See the "KISS Toolbox" at: http://home.pct.edu/~evavra/kiss/wb/AK_Codes.htm
The KISS explanations, obviously, do not satisfy the linguists / grammarians, but students who learn to use them are able to see and discuss how every word, every part of any sentence in some way is structurally related to the main S/V/C pattern. 
Ed

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