that doesn't seem to suffer too many of the usual flaws
Can you please explain, or link to, which usual flaws you're alluding to?
Value drift (for uploads), misunderstanding of what we mean (for standard AI), and a whole host of other problems (a lot about this on Less Wrong). This seems to be a satisfacing solution that doesn't seem immediately to blow up.
Toy model of an upload-based AI that doesn't seem to suffer too many of the usual flaws:
Find an ethical smart scientist (a Gandhi-Einstein), upload them, and then run them at ultra high speed, with the mission of taking over the world/bringing friendliness to it. Every hour of subjective time, they get reset to their initial specifications. They can pass any information to their resetted version (limiting the format of that info to a virtual book or library, rather than anything more complicated).