Giant fail in the sky.
"different from the humdrum tokamaks and laser-ignition chambers which have thus far offered such disappointing results"
Uhm what? Dissapointing to whom?
"The governments of the world would never allow anything which threatened to solve such a major problem as this -- people might talking about freedom if they did"
And by governments you mean the lizzard people who put explosives in the twin towers right?
"What if fusion is based on a huge misconception that we just haven't discovered yet? We seem to have been at the same stage for about 20 years with no more progress"
That's because you're not paying attention, the values of Q are going up all the time, we're just finding new ways to do it - and after the ITER which builds on JET is finished DEMO (DEMOnstration Power Plant) is planned, which if the name doesn't give it away is intended to be a demonstration commercial reactor which will actually produce electricity and continuiosly run.
The trouble of course is this stuff is crazy expensive and takes a long time, because it's exceptionally hard to do science and engineering which is only just becomming possible to do.
It's not a big leap to say projects like the ITER are more complex that the likes of the LHC or the ISS, just the LHC is a giant (scientific) leap into the unknown JET and ITER and other such projects like HIPER are actually incremental science we basically know works - just like I said, they're huge financial and engineering tasks.
Most of the technology in the LHC didn't exist when the building started, so lets not get ahead of ourselves assuming solid science doesn't work when it provably does.