I don’t buy the argument that he just wanted to make this issue go away - take the court out of the decision. He could not possibly have created a bigger red flag than he created by all this. If he wanted to hide in a corner somewhere he could have agreed with the liberals that it was a commerce clause thing and been done with it, or he could have agreed with the conservatives and Kennedy, that it wasn’t allowable by the commerce clause so if Congress wanted to give it a try as a tax they could go ahead later on.
The attempted arm-twisting of the conservative justices and Kennedy, the inability to articulate to the other justices any reasonable rationale for his decision, and his fanangling things around so he ended up deciding he could write the “majority” opinion (but then changing the majority opinion so Ginsburg should have been the one to decide who would write the majority opinion)... all suggests to me that he was desperate to come up with this result even though he knew he had no way to justify it. He wanted to hide behind Kennedy, as if Kennedy was the one to blame for upholding Obamacare - and the media (such as Jake Tapper) were providing the cover for him to do that, saying that Roberts would vote with Kennedy in order to make it seem more of a consensus, for the sake of the court’s reputation. Only trouble is, Kennedy was too solid to fall for it, so in the end Roberts couldn’t hide that he was the whole decision.
If Roberts was concerned about the court’s reputation and about the decision showing a consensus he could not have FAILED more miserably than he did in his handling of this. Why do the clerks all know about the arm-twisting, and why are there leaks about this? Between Roberts, the other justices, the clerks, etc.... there is no way there could be a bigger red flag for something really rotten going on. All this stuff seems to me to be about like a flashing whiz-bang for the whole world to see and know something is definitely wrong.
That is what I was thinking. He seems to have gone way out of his way to make it look weird, as if to signal something or other and ot get a lot of attention. All the other options you suggest would have been way more low key to reach various goals people have been suggesting.