It sounds to me like you are confusing a prediction, which is what theories are responsible for, with an explanation, which is what pedagogies are responsible for. As you have no objection to the predictions of special relativity, you obviously are objecting to the pedagogy that involves saying that moving things contract. But this is a common problem in relativity, that the words you choose to explain what is happening rely inextricably on the approach you take to quantifying what is happening-- in other words, they depend on your choice of coordinate system. The way I like to think of this is, reality actually contains less information than the coordinatization that we use to quantify it would tend to lead us to think. All reality really includes are things that are invariant to the coordinate system, i.e., the results of experiments. This is the difference between a theory and a pedagogy-- the theory itself only includes the invariant elements, but the pedagogy also brings in arbitrary elements that are convenient for the application of the theory. As an example, on another thread it was debated if the Earth has to be rotating, or if it may be viewed as standing still, while the rest of the universe is in rotation. But the answer is, Earth rotation is a pedagogy, not a theory. So it sounds to me like you have a legitimate beef if people are taking the conventional pedagogy of special relativity too seriously (and attributing unique reality to it), whereas only the predicted results of experiments has claim to such a serious interpretation. On the other hand, if you accept that length contraction is part of the conventional pedagogy, and is useful for arriving at predicted results of experiments (so the prediction is unique even though the pedagogy is not), then you see there really is no problem with the theory of special relativity after all.