>a linguistic sleight of hand masking a plain old dualistic standpoint.
These terms are getting at something central to consciousness, the fact that there is a conceptual duality between how we conceive of it from the first-person and how we conceive of it from an objective standpoint. We can't disavow this conceptual duality, a theorist offering an explanation of consciousness that doesn't capture this dual nature of the phenomenon will be rightly considered eliminating the explananda.
But a conceptual duality does not imply an ontological duality. In other words, the fact that we conceive of consciousness in these seemingly opposing ways does not imply two separate phenomena. The term dualism has become a shibboleth to be avoided in serious philosophy of mind, but this is a mistake. A satisfying explanation of consciousness must offer some phenomena that carries a resemblance to our personal datum as experiencers of sensations. This must then be related to the scientific story of how electrical signals are transformed into behavior. This just is the problem of consciousness. Anything less misses the point.
>For one, the "something" in the 2nd formulation [...] is most readily interpreted as an object, closing the door to any process-like interpretation of consciousness.
I agree that the language we use in describing consciousness is unfortunate and has done real damage to what we consider as promising avenues for investigation. We are cognitively biased towards conceptualizing the world in terms of "things" and so we expect our explanations to also be in terms of things. When consciousness isn't found in thing-ness we are tempted to posit a new kind of thing that carries the conscious properties. But we've been lead off course by our initial conceptualization. I'm in favor of seeing objects as processes rather than discrete units. Consciousness is likely in the active dynamics rather than any static property.
>I can easily imagine a complete physicalist explanation of consciousness which would still not lead to a valid answer of "what is it like to be a bat" due to quite obvious limitations of language or the plain invalidity of the question.
Yeah, we will never know "what its like" to experience the existence of another living creature. But this is just a limitation of physical descriptions. This isn't a demerit of physicalism or materialism as a methodology. This is no reason to turn to alternative methodologies that can only hope to offer pseudo-explanations of consciousness at best.