a system that lets people express which issues they care about in a freeform way

We already have that: the Internet, and the major platforms built on it. Anyone can talk about anything.

allowing us to simply express our feelings about the issues which actually affect us.

If the platform is created, how do you get people to use it the way you would like them to? People have views on far more than the things someone else thinks should concern them.

You're still comparing a real situation with an imagined one. For such a large aspect of one's life, I do not think it possible to have such assurance that one can imagine the hypothetical situation well enough. Whatever you decide, you're taking a leap in the dark. This is not to say that you shouldn't take that leap, just to say that that is what you would be doing. You won't know what the other side is really (literally! really) like until you're there, and then there's no going back. (As I understand it, and my understanding may be out of date, the sort of drugs you are considering have permanent effects from the outset. Even a small step down that road cannot be taken back.)

Even in the case of blindness, I have read of a case where sight was restored to someone blind from birth, who ended up very dissatisfied. Because if you've never seen, it takes a long time to make any sense of the restored sense. Not to the point of putting his eyes out again, I think, but there was no "happily ever after".

But then, there never is.

There is an important asymmetry between the status quo and all alternatives. The status quo exists. You are walking around in it, seeing it close up, experiencing it. Any questions you may have about the reality around you can be answered by investigating it, and that investigation may turn up things you did not know, and did not know you did not know.

Alternatives, however, are imaginary. They're something made up in your head. As such, they do not have the tangibility — literally — of reality. They do not have the inexhaustibility of reality. You cannot discover things about them that you did not put into them. Outside of mathematics, applying reasoning to an imagined scenario is a poor guide to how it would work out if it were actually created. You don't know what you don't know about how it would work, and you have no way of discovering.

Or in brief, Status Quo Bias Fallacy.

I wouldn't see any compelling reason to induce in myself the desire to have sex.

That might only be true up until having the actual experience. Then you would be in a position to say which state of affairs you actually prefer.

ETA: See also.

Am I rationally required to take them?

Nobody is ever "rationally required" to do anything. [Imagine Soyboy vs. Chad meme here.]

There is a typo/thinko where you say the answers to (i) and (ii) "should be the same". They should be opposites, one "yes" and one "no".

Such an experiment would be better conducted by making a post announcing it at the top and following with chunks of unlabelled human or AI text, like Scott Alexander did for art.

"What is the state and progress of your soul, and what is the path upon which your feet are set?" (X = alignment with yourself) I affected a quasi-religious vocabulary, but I think this has general application.

"What are you trying not to know, and why are you trying not to know it?" (X = self-deceptions)

I hope I am not de-enlightening anyone by these remarks!

I'm not just talking about your thoughts and feelings. When I say "everything in your consciousness", I mean [what you perceive as] the Sun, other people, mountains in the distance, the dirt on your floor, etc.

To me, the Sun etc. are out there. My perceptions of them are in here. As anyone with consciousness of abstraction knows at a gut level, the perception is not the thing that gave rise to that perception. My perceptions are a part of myself. The Sun is not.

Less easy to define what it does. I’ve read some of their writings and watched some of their videos, and am as much in the dark.