I find that if I walk and I miss the fairway off the tee, my finding the ball is far more probable if I'm walking and can walk the line-of-fate that my ball suffered due to my club-swinging dumbassery and stock-lie clubs....

Dumb clubs!
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At least with irons fitting largely eliminates the clubs are the problem. A lot can be done with adjusting your current irons since bending for lie is reasonably cheap. Mostly its just finding someone you trust that knows that they are doing.
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My biggest fear is having any form of golf professional (even if a stick lie bender) telling me that it's not really the clubs, it's more like I'm the white version of Charles Barkley, or something like that....
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It's obviously not the clubs. Finding someone good that can help you with your swing and you trust is a lot more difficult. I have been lucky over the years in finding someone good to tinker with my swing but don't have a really good suggestion of how to find one.
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Eye 2 + no +. Still have the boxed radiused grooves but with lofts that are more up to date with modern sets.

Game improvement irons got as good as they were going to get with the Ping Eye 2s. Karsten pretty much perfected perimeter weighting. Now all of the advances are in shaft technology.

Today, people hit their irons longer because the lofts are cranked down 5-6* beyond what they were 20+ years ago. Most Taylor Made 6-irons are 26-26.5* now, compared to the Eye 2's 32* 6-iron.

The ISI's that you played are probably the least forgiving mass market iron that Ping ever made until the S-series (unless they were the ISI-K stainless), and the 845s, while forgiving for a player's cavity, were never really designed as a SGI iron.
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I had the ISI nickle variant that I saved up in part from mowing greens for a summer as an upgrade on my 845s. They were pretty nice at the time and sold them for bad change to the Titlist 704s.

Completely agree on the loft thing and it's fairly dumb how a 7 iron isn't the same and basically became a 6 iron with game improvement lofts. Still seems the players irons these days stay true to loft.

Also heavily disagree that irons didn't progress since the eye 2 +. Never cared for those irons at all and don't agree they are short because of lofts or shaft tech. You are paying the yardage penalty for an old cast iron for no reason.
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Just going with late 80s shaft tech as the equalizer with dynamic gold which many current irons still use. No way that something like a ping eye 2+ can roll with even the aged AP2s or I25s.
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Personal preference of the irons is irrelevant.

There are a few factors that will result in an iron generating more distance:

1) Mass. That's why a pured blade is still the longest club out there. Most mass behind the ball at impact.

2) Effective loft at impact. Lower loft generates less backspin which results in greater length. Most manufacturers now make lower lofted irons with an increased effective loft at impact to help people who scoop get the ball in the air.

3) Material construction: a face that has flex can provide a watered down version of the trampoline effect that gives drivers their current length, but nearly every cast iron made has a 17-4 stainless steel construction, identical to what Ping used in the Eye 2. Aside from a small amount of tungsten in the toe of the I25, that entire iron is cast from 17-4 as well.

4) Shafts. Pings used the ZZ-Lite for years, which is really a TT Lite XL. It played very stiff to flex. Since they introduced the Cushin option on their i3 models in '99, they've basically changed shaft technology with every new model (ZZ-65, CFS, AWT, and others I'm sure I'm missing).

Regarding forgiveness: that is going to happen through increasing the MOI of the club. However, as GD points out, MOI is pretty much maxed out anyway:

That five yards might mean the difference between carrying a greenside bunker or not, but any meaningful leaps in forgiveness won't come from chasing higher MOI. It's already pretty much maxed out. Consider, the MOI of the Ping Eye2, introduced in 1984 [sic], was 2,600 g-cm2.

Will more forgiveness come from irons with lower centers of gravity? Probably not. Lowering the CG with wider, heavier soles does help launch the ball higher, but if it's pushed too far beneath the point where the iron contacts the ball, you start to lose ball speed.

"With CG and MOI there's only so much that can be done, and most designers already know how to optimize both across each iron category," says Golf Digest Technical Panelist Martin Brouillette, a professor of mechanical engineering at the University of Sherbrooke in Quebec. "With the Ping Eye2, we know they got a little lucky. But now we're to the point where we don't have to be lucky anymore." What he means is that designers have studied perimeter weighting for a long time, and they know how it works
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FWIW, I played the i3s for six years and the i5s for five years, and the i5s are probably the best-regarded of Ping's modern irons from a forgiveness/playability standpoint. I noticed no significant difference loss in distance that wouldn't be accountable to a loft difference (and even then, I didn't really see one anyway).
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I defiantly agree no distance is gained at all from iron advances from all these year. The improvements have come from off center hits traveling further. Miss a strike with a modern iron and you may still get the distance but miss the green, Miss the same with an old style like and Eye 2 and you miss it short and the same direction.
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Distance loss on off hits vs. the old eye 2? Just find it hard to believe the eye 2 holds up to those in playability.
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Your very sound approach to irons is making me think I should just stick with what I have.
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You are making the game harder than it needs to be with those irons. Do you also carry an old Taylor Made Tour Spoon?
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Except that doesn't happen. The MOI on the Eye 2 is better than Ping's S series, and virtually identical to their I and G series irons. The higher the MOI, the less energy is loss due to twisting in off center hits, which means that more energy is delivered to the golf ball, maximizing distance.

The Eye 2 is the biggest clubhead I've played on an iron since I was a beginner.
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Back to back even par rounds in our club championship, won my forst 2 rounds of match play. Got beat 1 up in 19 holes to the eventual champ.

I was dormy going into 17, went birdie birdie to get it to even. Went back to 18 which is a par 5, made birdie and lost. Fuck
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