and have yet to receive a solid answer on the subject of why half-lives can't decay faster.
Half-lives don't decay. Half-lives are one way of expressing the measurement of how fast radioactive elements decay.
There are examples of the rate of decay changing a bit for some nuclei. These examples don't include carbon-14, potassium-40, uranium-235 or -238, or othere nuclei used for dating in the context of rocks. It is plausible that, if you stripped all 19 electrons from a potassium atom, its beta-decay rate would change. It's likely been calculated by how much it would change. But only one electron gets stripped off in earthly environments,
so it is immaterial when you're dating rocks.
Go read this thread:
EvC Forum: Age Correlations and An Old Earth, Version 2 No 1
the correlations among various dating methods will amaze you.
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