Yeah but that's what I don't want to do--because that makes Bitcoin just a USD proxy, not a currency and economy of its own. I'm interested in BTC as its own economy, but unfortunately the price instability and tendency of most users to exchange for USD in the end makes it impossible to explore that.
Every form of currency suffers this problem in the beginning.
There are really only two ways around it: easy convertibility into another currency that people already understand, or direct use-value of the currency commodity itself.
It's a question of social inertia. It's too early to expect people to think in BTC.
Logically speaking it doesn't make bitcoin a USD proxy, a non-currency or "not-a-economy" as you claimed. Fixing the bitcoin price to another currency is a good solution when the value of 1 bitcoin is changing rapidly, as it would take a lot of work to adjust it daily. Besides, you can fix the price to the average of multiple major currencies (like average of euro, American dollar and the British pound).
A currency can have an economy fully its own and still have prices pegged to another currency. There is a lot of historic precedent for that. You act like its an abhorant practice. Prices will stabalize as the BTC price approaches something more workable on a global scale, like $21,000,000/BTC
