That's very true: the thing we are most certain about is the thing most impossible to prove objectively. This goes for qualia in general: doctors don't even have a precise objective definition for pain, and usually just have you indicate which emoji printed on a paper describes you more!

I guess the area of phenomenology tries to do what you're saying: put the horse of consciousness back before the cart. But I almost don't know anything about phenomenology so I might be wrong about their intentions.

I guess the reason for not putting consciousness first is because - unless we want public discussion to degenerate back to 'you said VS I said', as is done with religion which leads to fighting and wars - we should only accept as objective truth what can be publicly verified by all. Otherwise what do you say to a person who is quite convinced he is God incarnate? 

My own approach to this whole argument that the senses betray us, is to ask "how do you know?", to which the answer is, "well, further inspection *by the senses* convinces me this is so". So the senses come out back on top.

In other words, I interpret most of these arguments to be of the form: "The senses (in specific occasions) mislead us. *Therefore* the senses (in toto) cannot be trusted." This is quite uncalled for if you realize that the only reason you know the *specific* sense impressions are misleading you is because of the senses *in toto*. The skeptics are, in effect, saying: because the senses (in toto) led me to the truth regarding some cases where I was misled, therefore I cannot trust them. It's like saying "person X showed me I cannot trust person Y, therefore people are not trustworthy". But if you don't trust person X then you don't have any evidence that any person is misleading you. So you need the senses to prove that certain sense impressions are misleading. But if you can prove that, then you can trust the senses.

At any rate, that's the summary of my own pet project in how I intend to deal with this kind of skepticism. 

Sorry for the long comment, I tend to be verbose :D