Good morning Holden;
You bring up some valid points but also miss the gist of my answer. The issue of ground effect and landing is more a function of stability and controlability than anything else. Ground effect reduces, or in some cases, even eliminates the wing's downwash over the horizontal tail. This makes the horizontal significantly less effective. Since it needs to bring the airplane to full stall with flaps, even near the ground, its sizing must account for the loss of downwash near that surface.
In a pusher, this problem is compounded since the windmilling prop also blankets the horizontal, further reducing its effectiveness.
Regarding your comment about getting lift from ground effect. Yes, a fore surface could be used to help the airplane rotate however your contention of it generating more lift due to its proximity to the ground is incorrect. For wings in general, ground effects are a function of three items. First, the strength of the ground's influence is a function of the wing's height above the surface. This has two functions: One is a function of the height versus the span; the other is the height versus the chord length.
In general, the height versus span ratio affects the induced drag generated by the wing. This is why some low wing airplanes tend to float. It's not that the wing is generating suddently more lift, it's just that as the airplane nears the surface, the induced drag component significantly decreases, thus extending the airplane's glide. This is what's somewhat incorrectly termed floating.
To get a lift benefit, the height of the wing must be close to the surface as a function of the chord length. To get a significant benefit, the wing's trailing edge has to be less than 15% of the chord length above the surface. So, for a five foot chord let's say, the trailing edge would have to be less than nine inches off the ground.
I agree that a tricycle airplane is a poor off-runway platform, although I fly a Cherokee Pathfinder, Piper's answer to the Cessna 180. So far I've had it in a number of less than ideal conditions and so far (knock on wood) have never had a problem.
But ground handling aside, what makes a good short or soft field gear is the ability to reach the flying or take-off angle of attack quickly. The tricycle gear requires accleration to reach a speed where the horizontal has sufficient power to rotate the airplane. It then has to generate the down-load, causing the mains to dig in further, before the airplane rotates and flys off. This is why most soft field take-offs are done with flaps down, since that way the airplane can usually take-off in a level attitude.
The tail dragger however is already in the nose high attitude and thus does not require the horizontal to force it that way. This is mainly why tail-draggers are preferred over planes with a nose gear in bush operations.
Are there other options? Probably. But the gear configurtion has to be balanced with the rest of the airplane's required operational characteristics and so all this becomes a balancing excercise of trading off one thing with another. The obvious question one must ask in a discussion of this type is why, in the last fifty years or so, have airplanes come out with primarily only two configurations of gear positioning? Is it because we, the designers, are blind or dum?
Not likely - we just tend to use what we know works. Balancing the flight requiremetns, the groundhandling requirements, and the drag characteristics, generally leads us back to the same choices.
Personally, I'm alwasys open to other ideas. In two weeks we're starting another bush-plane development project for an Alaskan pilot who now lives in Colorado. He has some really interesting ideas for his gear but boiling it all down, it still will be a basic taildragger, but with some very impressive rough field capabilities.