Mi'sen

Are there any accounts of "emptiness", preferably purely phenomenological/methodological, that don't presume a contentious metaphysics?

“The absence of thought with the presence of awareness” seems relatively unproblematic. (Although the possibility if rhat is denied by some major philosophers.) Nb I don’t particularly advocate that definition, just noting it as reasonably inoffensive metaphysically

“of that”, typo

What do you not like about it, that it is in some sense misleading (like given differing interpretations of what "thought" is), or that it is outright false/there is more to it?

Well “emptiness” is just a word. There’s 2000 years of arguments about “what it really means” (in the absence of a philosophy of language that would dissolve that question). Different thinkers have given it quite different interpretations.

Some of the meanings-in-use of “emptiness” are pretty clearly wrong; many are too vague or self-contradictory to do much work for us. Others might be importantly functional, but they’re hard to separate from their history of use and apply in a different context.

I avoid “emptiness,” and use the word “nebulosity” as a coined alternative, in order to point at a more-specific thing, which is one I think is important, and which is at least in the penumbra of some senses of “emptiness” in the literature.