Re: Then preference still qualifies. This holds as a factual claim provided [bunch of conditions]

Not "bunch of conditions". Reflective consistency is the same concept as "correctly copying preference", if I read your sense of "copying" correctly, and given that preference is not just "thing to be copied", but also plays the appropriate role in decision-making (wording in the grandparent comment improved). And reflectively consistent agents are taken as a natural and desirable (from the point of view of those agents) attractor where all agents tend to end up, so it's not just an arbitrary category of agents.

That implies that genes are preferences and preferences are genes.

But there are many different preferences for different agents, just as there are different genes. Using the word "genes" in the context where both human preference and evolution are salient is misleading, because human genes, even if we take them as corresponding to a certain preference, don't reflect human preference, and are not copied in the same sense human preference is copied. Human genes are exactly the thing that currently persists by vanilla "copying", not by any reversible (mutual information-preserving) process.

If you don't want me to use the words "copy" and "gene" for those concepts - then you are out of luck

Confusing terminology is still bad even if you failed to think up a better alternative.