It seems clear from the comments that any attempt to unpack "awesome" eventually fails on some example, why the general concept of perceived awesomeness doesn't.

Totally. Hence the link to fake utility functions. I could have made this clearer; you're not really supposed to unpack it, just use it as a rough pointer to your built-in moral intuitions. "oh that's all there is to it".

Drat, I wish I made it to the meetup where he presented it!

Don't worry. I basically just went over this post, then went over "joy in the merely good". We also discussed a bit, but the shield against useless philosophy provided by using "awesome" instead of "good" only lasted so long...

That said, it would have been nice to have you and your ideas there.