[Fnoord]

> but Mission Control forces me to walk through each space, insisting on animating the sequence and taking it's time to swap in the applications as I go along.

Alfred. Alt+Space by default (note you can also remove keybinds of Spotlight to make room for Alfred because I use Cmd+Space for Alfred and Alt+Space for iTerm2 fullscreen, running tmux via tmuxp).

EDIT: As joobus wrote above, I also recommend Amethyst. There's a small learning curve with the keybinds but that's it. Oh, I and I recommend Flux (remember you can temporarily put it off).