Well here's what happened. After all my tweaks seemed to fail, I decided "what the hell, I'm going to play it anyway...even if it does make me nauseous."
So I started playing it, trying my best to ignore the slow rotating effect. Well after playing it for a few minutes, I realized it wasn't doing it anymore! So I played it for about an hour or more. Then I thought, well I'm going to turn Insanity back on it the menu w/o undoing any of my cfg tweaks and see what happens.
After doing that, I have the neat shaking/blurring/etc. effects of insanity (which I like) but without the slow rotating, which was really the only effect that was bothering me aside from the head-bobbing (which was easy to turn off) If I could digress for a bit, I must say that head-bobbing is by far the worst effect for motion sickness in FP games and isn't even very realistic when you think about it...I mean, whose vision bobs up and down when they're walking/running?? It doesn't because your brain and eyes are smart enough to fix on stationary objects! So why oh why do they insist on putting it in FP games?? oh well, so long as I can turn it off....
Anyway, to all those of you who have the same problem I do, all I can say is that it seems changes to the cfg file involving sanity/insanity don't take affect right away. Maybe they only kick in when your sanity level changes.