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You make some good points, though I think the status quo is even more vulnerable in some ways. What would be a better way to try to equalize presidential influence over the court, do you think? Currently it seems a bit too based on luck, whether people die on the job while your party controls the Senate.
Not trying to, and not trusting anyone who pushes for it with any degree of power.
'Equalizing' presidential influence is not a good goal for the same reason equity-driven politics are bad for treating people equally, as it's a non-standard extremely open to abuse and manipulation as any President whose coalition is not politically dominant on the court can claim that they are not yet equal, and thus entitled to further reshape the court to their influence. It's a license for un-equal influence in the name of establishing an outcome, not a consistent process, with the state of said outcome being defined by the people in power with all the opportunities for bias and self-interest it implies in self-justifying why they should get away with more.
By and large* I am not a fan of having executive- or party-controlled replace their predecessors, and while I am also not a fan of the executive having no influence whatsoever, the modern movement to equalize presidential influence of the court is part of a more banal effort to establish partisan control of the courts by a political party that for decades has viewed itself in historically determinist terms as the inevitable majoritarian ruling party, and more recently the only legitimate party of governance. Said party's think-piece networks and partisans openly muses other efforts to gain partisan dominance of the courts, ranging from explicit court packing to pressure campaigns to create new vacancies, with enough variations that I have no faith of any broad sincere desire to equalize presidential influence over the courts, only to equalize their influence on the courts on the way to re-establishing partisan dominance and deference previously enjoyed.
*One of the few exceptions I tend to have is for court systems established by external/illegitimate powers (such as occupation authorities, colonial authorities, or coups) and/or which self-select their own successors without executive and/or legislative input (which creates insular captured-interest blocks of whoever dominates the internal replacement process). Even then, I'd far prefer that a new administration allocate a share of new appointments with the opposition, and not grant themselves direct majorities. Yes, I am aware this basically never happens.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but this is your reminder that Joe Biden was one of the specific leaders who introduced 'Borking' to the American lexicon, and that Democratic federal and Supreme Court politics have only escalated since then.
Adversarial court politics was not always the way, and it did not have to be the way, but it was the result of choices, specifically of the Democratic Senate leadership generation deliberately deciding to employ and normalize character assassination, appointment allocation, and other techniques to try and shape court composition. From Borking and other slander campaigns to the Bush-era Federal appointment stonewalling to arranging protests outside of judges houses or inside the Senate working areas, if there is a lack of goodwill to appointing Democratic judges, I'd wager it has some slight thing to do with Democratic conduct toward their peers on the topic.
None of your proposal address this very contemporary and living history, nor is there a reason why- in the face of very real and very earned distrust- a 'reform' that hyper-concentrates the ability to abuse judicial appointments in the hands of a party with a contemporary history of defecting on judicial norms that expects to be the primary beneficiary of the reform would be a beneficial thing at a constitutional level.
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