What is a Black Hole? - Stephen Hawking's final theory

Thumbs up for the illustration of the point that gravity, as described by GR, is not a force. There's a lot of fixation even among physicists on gravity as a force, hence as a (fundamental) field theory.
On the matter of what BH's are, first of all they are certain solutions to GR equations, which yield certain consequences such as that there's an event horizon from which nothing escapes.
We somehow get the picture that things fall in and are "lost" to us, or rather the BH (its properties) is all that is left as physically accessible to us. In a sense what is accessible includes the proximity of its event horizon, though properly this is still the "outside universe" (relative to the BH).
But is the "sink hole" the right picture? When things fall into the BH, when they reach its event horizon?
For any reference system of the outside universe, not at any finite time: it takes an infinite amount of time for something to be seen as falling in. The picture that is given and objective to the outside universe is that of energy-matter accumulating on this side of the event horizon.
This "seeing" that we are talking about is not simply appearances, they are objective relations under general-relativistic laws. When we determine a distribution of energy-matter to put into the GR equations, it is in the very same sense as we are now speaking of "seeing".
We started by saying that BH's are certain solutions to GR equations, but these solutions, via the equations, corresponds to energy matter distributions. Proper theoretical BH solutions have infinite density at the singularity inside the event horizon. You can get to that by considering a fixed energy-mass and progressively reduce the volume it occupies. But this is not a physical process, it is an analytical path through a set of solutions of GR. At some point we get an event horizon, and the consideration that this has the property that nothing falls in renders the analysis we were following suspect, at least in view of describing physical BH's.
We do know that the solution for an energy-matter distribution outside of the event horizon is not the same as that of an infinite density at the singularity. Furthermore if no energy-matter is inside the event horizon, we would not have a well defined solution inside of it (where there is no energy-matter, GR doesn't have a unique solution). Einstein though that these multiple solutions would represent the same physics, I think this scenario suggests the possibility that simply geometrodynamics is not defined where it is not well defined: there is no inside. And this latter point makes physical sense to the outside universe for the very fact that it sees nothing getting in.
A physical black hole might not be described by the traditional proper theoretical BH solution, with an inside and a singularity, rather by a solution considering that energy-matter is accumulated on this side of the event horizon. Then, the picture is not that of a sink-hole, but that of a geometrodynamical cavitation: what is cavitating due to high energy-matter density is the very geometry of spacetime. And we probably shouldn't think that there is an inside (well defined to the outside universe), we have no reason to think that the geometry of spacetime is embedded in any other extension, curvature is intrinsic, and in the cavitation scenario it does not extends to the other side of the horizon.
The benefits of this scenario are:
- it fits the idea (it is based on it) that it takes an infinite amount of time to "see" anything fall into a BH, more precisely, to this universe nothing falls into the event horizon, rather it accumulates on this side of it,
- there is no singularity,
- there is no information loss,
- makes sense of the result that BH entropy is a function of the area rather than the volume.
The cons: I don't know if it is right. :P