It also does away with the elevator drag causes by the elevator pushing down in most traditional designs. Canards are more efficient due to this.
That's debatable. I don't fully understand all the arguments, but on the canard forums, people reckon that the efficiency of the canard is limited because it has to have a very high loading, and the inefficiency of this offsets the advantages of eliminating tail downthrust.
It's apparently not always true either that tandem seating is more efficient than side-by-side seating ('sociable', to borrow cycling terminology). What tandem seating loses in x-sectional area, it makes up for in wetted area. On the Long-EZ this is 'free' because the passenger is effectively sitting where the empennage would otherwise be, and this space is poorly utilised in most aircraft.
Other than that, I don't think we're disagreeing so much on matters of fact as emphasis. And perhaps not even on that - I agree that the best way to massively reduce an aircraft's consumption is to make it much smaller, but I don't agree that the rest's just icing.
Touring motor gliders (and derivatives) are another class of aircraft with a l/d at least twice that of most light aircraft. Again, most of them aren't designed to go fast, but when compared with aircraft in the same speed category (like the Tommie) they still come out very favourably in terms of fuel consumption.