You're still nuts, though.
What a surprise! Oh, wait, it isn't :p
Anyway, I've been keeping experimenting. Starting from flight from Naboo actually works really well. The start is in a new-hopey good sense "WTF is going on?!" way. Plus leaves the trouble of trying to explain the most controversial beginning moments, like what's happening on the TF battleship, why TF is invading and so on and so on. Every vital information can be explained in the title crawl.
Padme-Jar-Jar talk on the ship suddenly has a purpose of introducing the characters, so it's not cut out.
Darth Maul is introduced together with Sidious when Viceroy talks about Queen's escape. But, we don't see Darth Maul at all until he ambushes Qui-Gon near the ship (only his probes, a few times), which makes a nice "WTF" moment. I'm thinking of further cutting Darth Maul altogether until he appears infront of Qui-Gon, Obi-Wan and the Queen on Naboo itself. I think this treat of him makes Darth Maul actually cooler, he's like a hunter.
I would like to cut very much Sidious, so he doesn't totally appear in the movie, making the assumption that Federation acts from it's own accord. But that would also leave Darth Maul totally nameless, and so far Darth Maul's introduction is the only intercutting between the good guys and bad guys during the first forty minutes of the movie until they leave Tatooine (well, I didn't experiment after Tatooine anyway).
There's no Obi-Wan wardrobe talk, no Obi-Wan midichlorian talk, and nobody contacted from Naboo. "What if it's true, and people are dying?" seems like a dumb question to me. I mean, the planet is under blockade, and invaded by a droid army, and... of course they're dying. Plus Sio Bibble is like a totally pointless character now.
I see a few problems with the way my cut is going, though. Firstly, since we don't see any gungan city or anything, it seems that the gungan army may aswell appear out of nowhere... And secondly, Viceroy, who's like supposed to be the main villian of the Episode (invading planet and stuff) hasn't too much screentime. I'm still thinking about what to do with that.
PS. Oh, and I cut out Jabba fully. His appearance was totally pointless. I think I already said that, but anyway I'll repeat, I think it will be a nice progression: EpI, we hear about Hutts, EpIV, we hear about one particular dangerous Hutt, EpVI - we see that particular dangerous Hutt.
PS2. All changes I've made so far are for my rough cut edit version, I didn't start clean anything yet.
EDIT:
Also, I would like to point out that the first time we see a lightsaber ignited is during the Darth Maul-Qui-Gon battle, which is kinda cool.
I've removed the Watto mind trick (meaning no mind tricks in this Episode, and I guess no mind tricks at all until EpIV).
And the learning curve of "what's a Jedi? The Force?" will be going pretty well in this Episode, albeit in a different style. If in EpIV most information was from Obi-Wan's teaching, in my EpI cut we learn about Jedi and the Force mostly in action. First as Qui-Gon talks about premonitions of the future, then makes the bet with Watto in his favor, fight with Maul, Council on Coruscant - yeah, everything will be pretty nice, I think.