slowrotor,
"Dave, I have a primal distrust of the intermeshing configuration and so it is hard for me to look at the advantages."
"The intermesh may have one of the safest records and other advantages but it still probably would be a hard sell."
Over the years, I came to the same conclusion as you, regarding the fault of the intermeshing configuration. The fault lies not with the dynamics and aerodynamics of the configuration. It lies with the perception of the configuration. A perception that originated 55 years ago when Kaman, for understandable reasons, took the configuration in the wrong direction, and Kellett, who was going in the right direction, lost a famous test pilot due to a non related fault. This ended any future consideration, evaluation, or development of the intermeshing configuration.
After thousand of hours of research, I am strongly convinced that the intermeshing and perhaps the interleaving are the best rotorcraft configurations. Or, as R. W. Prouty said "...... it [the intermeshing configuration] may have been ahead of its time and just the right configuration for some future helicopter requirement."
Dave