At this point, I can either write emails to the developers of the program and/or the applet and ask them to fix their shit, or I can downgrade Java to 7.25 and disable updating. Since only one of these two courses of action will likely solve anything, I choose the obvious.
Or you could just sign the applet yourself. Yes, it would be a bit of a hassle, but still faster (and less retarded) than all the hoops you went through...