This is a thoughtful post, thank you.
I still contend that the value of gold and silver can be manipulated. It is known that metals markets involving aluminum and other materials are manipulated by traders. There isn't a market which exists that is immune to overvaluing/undervaluing to manipulate price.
The manipulation of gold and silver is an order of magnitude more important than that of commodities. Gold and silver are at the center of our system, and so their manipulation is absolutely necessary if central banks are to keep people from running away from their issued currencies. The entire gold- and silver-standard system that was run by central banks for centuries until 1971 was an overt manipulation.
After all, who would trust unlimited-supply money as a store of value? Especially when the issuers have many incentives to issue more?
One key thing that is missing in precious metals to raise its price higher is a function of utility. If someone owned a 100 lb chunk of pure gold, they couldn't do anything with it other than sell it to redeem for fiat. Precious metals in that sense, lack options.
Selling the gold for fiat allows you to buy anything you need, with one extra step. When store of value is at stake, other considerations tend to fade into secondary importance.
They can't be utilized for electronic payment, earning interest, they can't be used to buy or sell. Metals are lacking the type of utility people have come to expect in the mdoern age where goods/services can be bought or sold in seconds with the click of a button.
So, this goes to the heart of the design of the system. It's nice to have convenient features in a money system, of course. The question is, who controls them, who profits from them, and how that power affects the world. The perverse incentives built into the state-bank alliance that runs our money system basically ensures inequality and war eventually, since deception, bubbles, and geopolitical conflicts are required to keep the system stable.
The economic progress of the world over the last centuries is real, and so is the spread of wealth. But I submit that this growth of wealth would have come about anyway, since the source of this wealth is real technical advance, not elite-controlled money. The Italian Renaissance was achieved without state-controlled money, before the state-bank alliance took control of every empire afterwards.
One natural evolution which could happen eventually is gold backed crypto. That could eliminate one of the advantages fiat has over crypto in terms of being backed by collateral.
With the internet and technology advancing, there must be a way gold & other precious metals can evolve like a pokemon into a superior form.