Using panels everywhere... without Panels Everywhere
I believe the answer to your question is "Use Panels everywhere". :)

As one of the maintainer of Panels Everywhere, I wonder what you mean with "completely dead"? Yes, I'm a bit slow in the issue queue, but that's because 1. Both me and merlin are crazy busy with the Panels queue (318 issues vs 15), and 2. I'm also not aware of any serious issues. Any help from the community in the Panels queue will greatly help with any PE issues as well.

You should use Panels Everywhere because:


There only thing that's preventing a stable release is a bug on d.o. (I just now updated the module page to say so.)
Merlin is also planning to redo the UI to be much more user friendly.
I build websites with Panels everywhere every single day at work. It works great. If any serious issues were to come up, they will most definitely be fixed. At NodeOne, we build nearly every single site with PE. We need it to work well. :)


I will take the opportunity to shamelessly suggest that anyone interested in Panels and/or Panels everywhere could contribute a bit of time to the issue queue. The current number of contributors, 2, is vastly outnumbered by the number of questions being asked. This slows down development considerably. My d.o profile has the necessary info for contacting me about this. :)