being required to deposit ~1 XMR for mining, would definitely make it impractical to hop pools much

Wownero block is worth ~0.23 XMR

I'm sorry. I was there when the idea of WoW fired off neurons and the currency was born. As a joke. I have a hard time taking it seriously :D

FWIW, my proposal for wownero was to sign with the one-time transaction spend key, AKA the "stealth address", which would not require any changes to the coinbase tx format as the public key is already included there

True. I didn't think that stealth address is actually a one-time public key K0. Spending an output is actually signing a message with its private key k0, so signing any other message will be enough to prove that signer knows private spend key. Source: web.getmonero.org/library/Zero-to-Monero-2-0-0.pdf section 4.2 One-time addresses