Hi Steve,
Good luck with your experiment. I too am back on raw after a few attempts in the past (the first over ten years ago when I lived in a raw food house here in the UK). I recently did a detox retreat & that has launched me back on a re-discovery of raw. I'm very excited about it again.
I know exactly what you mean about the raw gourmet route - it does take a lot of time, but seems to suit parents already spending a lot of time preparing food for their children. I'm a busy guy too, so tend towards a fairly high fruit diet, which is indeed easy to prep.
I have recently been reading books by Victoria Boutenko (Green for Life) & Mike Nash (Aggressive Health) & they both point towards the key missing ingredient in most raw diets being chlorophyll. This makes sense as it is almost identical to the basis of haemoglobin & easy for the body to make blood with. Victoria identified that while wild primates have a high fruit diet, they also eat a significant proportion of leaves & blossoms (25-50%, depending upon the season). So she started making green smoothies - blending fresh greens with fruit & now thinks that it has made all the difference in making the diet a success with her family. I've only just started doing this (about a week), but I so far feel really good including at least one every day & it certainly takes away my hunger for a long time afterwards.
Another area you might like to check out is a friend of mine, Tony Wright, a long term raw fooder, who has also been doing some revolutionary thinking & experiential research this last decade around the raw diet in relation to human evolution, sleep & consciousness. In order to get some more attention for his work he even did an 11-day monitored experiment this summer & broke the world sleep-deprivation record. It's mind-blowing stuff, so you might like to check out his work at
Left in the Dark.
Enjoy! and good luck!
Aranya