First of all the name of Ven. Analayo’s paper: Compassion in the Āgamas and Nikāyas (2015). If you haven’t got it, it’s available here.
I think it is really important that you substantiate and justify your translations with notes, otherwise much of the work you do will be lost on readers and especially future translators. It is much easier to dismiss someone else’s translation than to take the time to understand where they are coming from. Notes will reduce the threshold for those who wish to understand your approach. In fact, I think the translations should be annotated as they appear on Suttcentral. You should be able to hide the notes, just as you can with the other textual information, but it should be possible to access them for anyone who is interested. I also intend to annotate my Vinaya translation. (By the way, I have finished the Mahāvibhaṅga.)
I like the idea of “the less meaning is better”. Of course, it takes some of the fun out sutta discussions, but that is probably a good thing. Too much fun = too much time wasted!
Yes, Ven. Bodhi does rely on the commentaries. I thought I would avoid this with my Vinaya translation, but alas, I now realise the value of this literature. There are just too many ambiguities in the Pali. Some of these could probably be resolved by careful study of the Canon, but this is often very time consuming and turning to the commentaries is the easy solution. Time, as always, it the primary constraint. Another constraint is my own judgement, or lack thereof. I have come to realise that my first intuition is often wrong, and the commentaries act as a useful correctives. This does not mean that I accept them uncritically, but that their value has become more apparent to me. I eventually had to download all the commentaries and sub-commentaries from the VRI site.
Still, I certainly do sympathise with your view that the commentaries sometimes interpret the suttas according to ideas that are alien to them. This happens in the Vinaya too, and it is definitely the right approach to ignore them in such situations. Whether the later ideas are in fact right or wrong is actually quite irrelevant. We are trying to present the word of the Buddha, not the word of interpreters.