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@moth
do cables really stretch, or is it the outers that compress?
My own idea for the 'ultimate' rim brakes is to take the arms of the EE brakes from the main pivots down, build them into the forks and drive them with hydraulics. The only reason conventional brakes need so much brake-drop adjustment range is to accommodate forks with different tyre clearances. Build the brakes into the fork and you can probably get away with no drop adjustment at all, leaving little more than the pads in the air-stream. The pipes would run down inside the steerer, and i'd build a progressive advantage linkage into the levers, where it can be designed to recalibrate automatically if it gets too close to bottoming out. (A good reason not to build progressive advantage linkages into cable brake levers is that the high leverage bit would be quite harsh on the cables. I think hydraulics would tolerate this better.) You might need to stiffen the forks a bit, but that should be more efficient than providing an entirely separate structure. I'd worry a bit about how brake heat is handled.
The rear brakes would be built into the chain-stays, as they are already pretty chunky.