"The 4 gram per day recommended dose is also the maximum safe dose, one that
must not be exceeded, an unusual situation for any drug, particularly an OTC
drug, one placing a large fraction of users close to a toxic dose in the
ordinary course of use," the report said.
The reality is, unless you're a child or a teenager, you should just take aspirin. It won't damage your liver or give you an ulcer like acetaminophen or ibuprofen. And it is actually an anti-inflammatory, not just a fever reducer and mood-altering drug.
You might want to rethink your position
As far as interactions, you're right, it does interact with other drugs and non-drugs (the fact that lots of other OTC medications contain acetaminophen is also troubling, but a different issue in my mind), but in my experience as a guy who has to take a lot of painkillers and who's married to a nurse who takes care of figuring out what's safe, acetaminophen is one of the less worrisome drugs to deal with. On re-reading, I pretty clearly chose a bad way of expressing myself with the word "lack"- I meant "fewer" rather than "none at all"- so sorry about that, but with the appropriate disclaimers about don't take my advice, etc., I stand by my statements as regards my own experience- acetaminophen is very safe and very convenient when you don't overdose. Unfortunately, as I have just learned, it's really easy to overdose, and that's really sad and a big problem.
I tend to lean towards aspirin for a few reasons. It's older (100 years versus 30 years old) so we've had more time to figure out what other side effects it has, as well as interactions with other drugs. The blood thinning effect reduces the chance of heart attack or stroke (while it's in your system), which is always nice. There are some studies which seem to show that aspirin has anti-cancer properties, but I'm not sure if I believe them, because they have not proposed a mechanism of causation. Finally, ibuprofen seems to be sold in higher doses in general and have a more intense effect, which isn't really want I want. I just want something that does the minimum most of the time.
You're worried about effects that occur with chronic high dosages. That's not the typical use-case.
(Edit: Googling for "aspirin suicide", find it in top 20 list of suicide methods http://wantdeath.blogspot.de/2011/07/method-5-of-suicide-asp... )
Did you read the article? The whole point of it is that the dose of acetaminophen found in many pills in the US is dangerously close to the level at which liver damage occurs.
The same can't be said for other painkllers.
For me ibuprofen is a miracle. I get bad headaches from time to time that aspirin and acitominphen have negligible impact on. Ibuprofen knocks them out completely.
When your pain is bad, it is tempting to just keep taking more drugs until it starts working, and everyone knows (er... everyone I know; again, probably biased 'cause married to a nurse) you're not supposed to take too much ibuprofen 'cause it's bad for your stomach, so might as well take tylenol. Fortunately, one of the genuine good features of acetaminophen is a lack of negative interactions with other drugs, so the safe way (as far as I know / have experienced, not a medical professional, don't take my advice, etc., etc.) to assuage that temptation is to vary the types of painkillers you use- little bit of ibuprofen, little bit of tylenol, and unless it gets really bad (at which point you should probably be seeing a doctor and not self-medicating anyway), that generally keeps you within safe limits for both (if you wanna add more types to the rotation, though, you do have to do some research and make sure that the additions don't cause bad interactions or have similar mixtures of active ingredients; e.g., if you take Aleve, that counts towards your total ibuprofen dosage limits).