Sure, but having an experience doesn't mean that you can explain it. So you're in exactly the same boat: you have to explain things that you don't understand on the basis of experience.

Experience indicates that things are material. Even people, who have minds, are material. Well! Kind of a surprise. But that's where experience goes. How does it work? Dunno. There are lots of things that we don't know how it works. It'd be cool if we knew, but experience tells us we're not going to know everything. Maybe that one's too hard for now. No big deal; we can keep learning things.

Now, I grant that a universal mind could be made consistent with qualia.

But if all you're asking for is self-consistency with materialism, it's easy. We can postulate a computational module that computes representations of goal and internal and external state and valence mutually bound together. One such instantaneous binding is a qualis, and entities like us that run such computations continuously and can report on them can make each other aware that we're running these kinds of computations. Nothing there but a special class of computations.

Is that how it works, actually? I dunno. Could it work that way? Sure, doesn't seem like there's any reason why it couldn't.

"There is a metaphysical gap," you assert, without argument. You literally have no argument. Just bare assertions. It's all bluster, no content. You say things like "I'm not going to entertain pure nonsense" and "complete crap w/o a lick of actual logic".

But of course it is exactly that which is the pure nonsense, the complete crap without a lick of actual logic. You expect anyone to take your apparent revulsion in place of an argument? Ha!

People say things like, "qualia aren't physical". But this is just begging the question! How do you know it isn't physical? You intuit it? And you expect anyone to take that seriously after viewing a few dozen visual illusions?

You also pontificated about simplicity and stuff, but I don't want explanations like that. I want to know why the fine structure constant is what it is. I want to know why there are no magnetic monopoles, and why there's both electricity and magnetism at all, and why they're related in the way Maxwell's equations say. I want to know why there are so many species of beetles.

I don't think the idea of the universal mind gives us any purchase on these questions at all. It's far, far, far, far too powerful of a hypothesis. It can explain anything, and can predict nothing (because any occurrence is consistent).

But fundamentally, you seem fixated on the idea of metaphysical difference, but I, for my part, am fixated upon the idea of the non-pile-ness of sand and how metaphysically distinct a grain is from a pile (i.e. completely) and therefore there can be no piles of sand.