I suspect that, if you tried to model this mathematically, you'd end up with something that basically matches Newtonian gravity.

I suspect that it wouldn't. His theory implies, among other things, that soft objects are flattened in the direction of the gravitational force (because it pushes only on the distant surface), that gravitational force in greater distance is proportional to 1/r (not squared), that a heavy object of mass M hidden behind the Sun would exert no additional pull on us (or, if the Sun is partly permeable to "dark energy", the difference in g would be still smaller than GM/r^2 as predicted by Newton)...

It may not be so important, but in my opinion we shouldn't so readily assume that a randomly made hypothesis is only a non-Occamian reformulation of the best available theory. Most random hypotheses are false.