Didn't Dave Barry make the point that the holodeck would be the last human invention? Societies that might want to spread through the galaxy while the rest of their species navel-gazes would still have to come up with a huge amount of energy and technological know-how to do so. It would be so much easier to live in a nutshell and count oneself a king of infinite space, especially when the best and brightest minds of your society are coding virtual reality environments or, at best, keeping the computers running, instead of building interstellar ships etc.

bioIgnoramus, 
 
Young Frankenstein? 
 
Seriously, it's probably the rarity of the Germanic "ei" vowel sound in English. My surname has "ei" in it and the average stranger pronounces it "ee." 
 
Einstein is so famous everyone gets it right, but most people are unable to extrapolate the wider rule of how to pronounce "ei" from his name. 
 
Unrelated, I have a pet peeve when Texans refer to the German-settled town of New Braunfels as "New Brunsfeld."

From my perception of the German-American experience, reversion of Anglicized surnames back to German is probably very rare. First, after building up generations of reputation around the name Smith, few people will ditch that in favor of Schmidt, especially if there's a lot of government paperwork involved. There's also no social movement to encourage reGermanization. Like all whites, we're not supposed to dwell on our ethnic identity. We all speak English; foreign language instruction is very poor; and most of our families have been here for so many generations that ties to German culture have eroded and/or were downplayed as part of the "more Catholic than the Pope" defense against the anti-German hysteria of 1917-1918. 
 
As for the rising rank of various German surnames 1990-2000, I bet the sample sizes are too small to be very meaningful. For example, my parents raised the number of American families with my surname by about 0.05% when they arrived in 1968. Also, many German surnames got translated into American English in multiple ways that don't show up on your table: Muller, Mueller, and Miller are all cognate surnames, as are Weiss and Wiess, Shafer/Shaffer/Shaeffer/Schaffer/Schaeffer, any name ending in -man/-mann, etc. 
 
Finally, don't forget that many Ashkenazim have Yiddish/German surnames; immigration from Israel could account for the rising rank of Farber, Fuchs, and Jung.

Great recognition that the settled prejudices of the masses act as a check on the high and mighty. I'm glad our evolutionary legacy gave the masses the power to prevent Augustus, one of the most powerful men in human history, from using the R-word. 
 
Lesson for the high and mighty: if you want to change the masses, the only way to make it work is to play judo with human nature.