I think that, instead of focusing our attention to the event horizon, we shoud be looking to where inside black holes we would reach the Planck density or Planck acceleration limits. These are much more fundamental concepts than "escape velocity" (an idea incorrectly applied to massless quanta, IMHO).

I've also thought about how the extreme density present in black holes would "trap" the information of what falls in, and "propel" it to the future for external observers, due to extreme time dilation effects. So your analogy of Black holes as super slow-motion implosions sounds perfectly right for me.

For instance, Carlo Rovelli has found that thinking in these terms (using Planck density as a limit for what happens inside black holes) he is able to describe their behavior and dynamics in a very simple way, getting rid of all paradoxes at the same time.

When I found Rovelli's paper about Planck Stars (https://arxiv.org/pdf/1401.6562.pdf), everything clicked in my mind.