Very nice write-up. Several years ago, I took a graduate class that covered NEAT and ended up doing a little project [0] to see if you could apply similar ideas (recurrent nets evolved via NEAT). My idea was to use it for multi-agent control problems, though, where you want agents to try and "teach" other agents whenever they learn something useful.

[0] https://github.com/tansey/social-learning (note: not as clean of a structure as OP's code!)