Joseph, your assertion that all the observables would be the same if the universe went around the earth I believe is incorrect. The impetus for Copernicus was the fact that the orbits of the other planets seemed to reverse at certain intervals, if they were observed from earth. These were called epicycles (fudge factors). Copernicus successfully reduced the number of these necessary to match theory with observation, but could not eliminate them entirely because of the unknown fact of eliptical orbits. After Newton and Kepler, it was possible to eliminate them entirely using simple pure heliocentric elliptical orbits derived from Newtons laws of motion, and match the observations perfectly with no need for those ugly retrograde circles.
It happens to be a major goal of science to find the most concise, short, and elegant explanation that completely explains a set of observations. When you have to kvetch all kinds of arbitrary constants and second and third order effects, the theory gets ugly, and is less and less likely to be accepted.