That zombie has been branded as the former thing, of little practical concern, rather than the latter thing, which I think would be of reasonable (and possibly near-term) practical concern to us is very annoying to me, because I think it would be a great term for the latter thing.

Then go complain to Chalmers, because he's the one who established that term! We had nothing to do with it.

if worlds are equiprobable, 1) why we're not in a near-maximum-entropy universe

It is highly unlikely that a given person who purchased a lottery ticket will win. If a person receives data indicating that they have won, though, the unlikeliness of that outcome is not grounds for discarding the information out of hand. Sometimes, people win.

It seems to me unlikely that a functioning organism such as ourselves would be able to persist for very long in a near-maximum-entropy universe. Even if we presume the local space were relatively and anomalously ordered, it is far more likely for that to happen at a point in time where the universe as a whole is relatively ordered than at a point where everything else is a mess.