1. In doing away with value apparatus, are you suggesting that science should prefer economy over realism?
2. I did agree that you could do away with the value apparatus if you lived in an economy in where there was no money and in which the same, never changing things served as inputs and magically re-appeared as the only, never changing outputs produced in the ever same way. Yes in that economy capital can be aggregated, the rate of profit and prices determined without recourse to value once the distributional question is resolved extra economically.
Just don't see what that proves.
For once the outputs are novel or technical change occurs inter-periodically the Sraffian theory as a theory of the real center of gravity simply falls apart (too many unknowns now given the equations) harder and more totally than does Marx's theory once you complete the transformation procedure (by the way I argue that more than one hundred years of criticism has basically inverted the way in which Marx's procedure was incomplete; it was not that he failed to transform the inputs from values or simple prices to prices of production as the means of production and wage goods are assumed from the outset to have been bought at market prices; rather he had mistakenly assumed that the value transferred from the means of production was proportional to their cost price but once price-value disparity is admitted, Marx had to concede that he had made a mistake in his estimation of the value transferred from the means of production to the respective values of the branch outputs--this is the correct reading of the famous passage in which there was an admission of error, circa pp 256-57 of Capital 3 Penguin from memory).
At any rate, you complain about epicycles but your rival theory must make too many fantastic assumptions to close the equations--no new products, no on going technical change, no money, a necessarily equalized rate of profit for all capitals (again to reduce the unknowns to the number of equations). In other words, society must be a solid crystal for the theory to have realism, not a metamorphosizing organism. Even Geoff Hodgson abandoned Sraffian theory for evolutionary economics.
3. To reject Marx's value theory you have to understand what it is. The analytical Marxists simply missed that it is a theory of money, not a theory of the simple identity between relative and equivalent form but a theory of a contradictory unity rooted in the contradiction immanent to the commodity. You seem as at home with the flat logical contradiction that the Sraffian theory is only an immanent critique of marginalism but also a description of real center of gravity on the basis of reified technical things as you are at sea with real contradictions many of which I have been mentioning here. This is the failing of the analytical Marxists, I think Sean Sayers has really begun the good fight here even if one does not want to reconsider the law of non-contradiction.
4. I have never suggested that the critique of the labor theory of value is idiotic. I teach against it. I emphasize that there is no sin against science in rejecting it. Mentioned several criticisms already. But I do think that many of the criticisms are bunk.
Rakesh