I don't like the "after a couple of rounds, 7s are allowed". It undermines part of the randomness. Our 'house game' simply had the problem that the robber arrives too quickly. So we made the rule that the robber can't advance until Player 1 is rolling for the third time. From that point forward, the robber advances. This gives the advantage of allowing more development, but without obviating the 'randomness' of robber landing.
With three d10s and one d6 you could do this:
d10 a: 6,6,6,6,6,8,8,8,8,8
d10 b: 4,4,4,10,10,10,3,3,11,11
d10 c: 5,5,5,5,9,9,9,9,1,12
d6: d10a,d10a,d10b,d10b,d10c,d10c
One roll, no relabeling. d6 tells which d10 to pull your number from.
This is interesting, but this is a bit more hackish than simply re-rolling the dice. Most people would just reroll.
My personal opinion is that dice-hacks should be done to reduce the amount of thinking necessary, not increase it while producing a slightly better result.
I designed a role-playing system once based on the median of 5 d10s. That worked pretty well. It generates a similar bell-curve distribution to the one you get by adding dice, but doesn't require mental arithmetic with large numbers (e.g. 5d10 involves a range of 5-50). I think m5d10 is better than 5d10 because it's easy to develop a feel for "difficulty 7" vs. "difficulty 8"... whereas if the numbers are 37 vs. 38, it gets to the point where 1 point doesn't mean much, and the numbers seem completely made up (which, of course, they are, but they shouldn't seem so).
1. Rerolling the dice is still a faster (and thus better) way of solving this problem.
2. He could've used the time he spent writing that article to release a free dice rolling iPhone app that implements his special Settlers roll. It could even keep track of when to stop rerolling sevens. There are several similar apps already in the store. It would be trivial to write one that auto-rerolled sevens. This is something that might actually be of use to people, though, then again, maybe not.
Statistically, as the number of times the dice have been rolled approaches infinity, a near-infinite string of 7s becomes exceedingly likely.
However, a short time before that, a meteor comes in through your window and knocks you unconscious... and oh yeah, the sun explodes. Damn the laws of probability!
Also: Free settlers-like multiplayer: http://games.asobrain.com/