"pixels in a sensor had to have the light hitting them head on"
I'd much rather NOT have the light hitting the pixels head-on, because that way it goes around any dust on the low-pass filter. At f/16, my D50's sensor looks covered in dust. At f/8 or below, you can't see any of it. The Bayer filter, UV/IR filter, and low-pass antialiasing filters align the light properly.
"back focus issues"
Erm...no. My 80-200mm f/2.8 push-pull, which is a twenty-year-old Nikon 35mm lens, is absolutely sharp, even at f/2.8, where the depth of field is tiny and any focusing issues would be blatantly apparent. Heck, I can still manual-focus a 35-year-old pre-AI Nikkor lens and get nice results, though not as contrasty as the ED lenses.
"soft in corners"
Actually, with a a cropped-frame body, it's the opposite. A 35mm image circle on a cropped-frame sensor results in only the middle of the image circle being used, where vignetting and distortion are less apparent, and better contrast and resolution.
"wide angles not good"
That problem lies with the cropped-frame sensor size. Nikon and Canon designed digital-only fisheyes and digital-only standard zooms, just like Olympus, to deal with this.
The 5 new lenses that came out are fully compatible with the D3, any DX-format DSLR, and older film cameras like the F6, F5, F100, and the like. The 400/500/600mm lenses are simply updates that add Vibration Reduction to Nikon's old supertelephotos. The 24-70mm is the latest and greatest standard zoom for 35mm bodies. The 14-24mm is an interesting proposition, as 14mm is currently Nikon's 35mm fisheye focal length, and it replaces the 17-35mm f/2.8. The lenses are not designed only for the D3, they're simply designed to put the best possible 35mm-diameter image circle a certain distance behind the lens mount.
The only correct statement I can find in your post is that the full-frame lenses have to be bigger, because they need more glass to get the full-sized 35mm-diameter image circle.