Home of the Snarkmaiden

I think the best local waffles I've had in a while were very probably a yeast-batter type. The cafe no longer does them that way, but I seem to recall they were in the direction of your ideal, and very good, at any rate. The thing that struck me at the time was how absurdly thick the batter was -- it seemed closer to dough than anything I'd previously seen under the rubric "waffle batter" which suggests to me a yeast recipe with a long rise to let the glutens develop.