gughok

Gap years are fine. From what I understand, what can hurt a little is anything on your application that sends the message that you're not sure where you want to be. So if you took time in your gap year(s) to attend graduate school completely unrelated to philosophy, that could make a small difference. I think, in the end, these things make little difference. What they want to see are strong letters and a background of formal study of philosophy (typically a degree in philosophy), in addition to an extremely strong writing sample, solid grades, and decent scores (roughly in that order).
A gap year may *help* you, if you use it to make a better application.

You should be fine. Most applications will let you have the self-reported scores submitted for the initial submission with the understanding that the official scores will be sent once they're available. 

POWERPREP II: Math 169/Reading 170/Didn't do writing
 
Actual: Math 170/Reading 170/Writing score not out yet.
 
Time studied: ~5 hours? I had a really strong preparation from my high school English courses and high school math contests.

I really disagree. I think OP's inflammatory rhetoric is needed in this climate. We don't need anymore waffley "Yeah, it's bad but it's not that bad!" talk. That's the kind of rhetoric that got academia into the corporatized mess it's in now. We need to stir the pot because if we don't, we know that administration will just keep hacking away until nothing is left but a mass of overworked and underpaid adjuncts.
 
As to your second point, I don't really think I'm neglecting anything. No one's denying that a Ph.D. stipend is not a welcome and stable income (in fact, I am in the same situation where I've never made so much and for so long). Nowhere in my posts have I advocated for not entering a Ph.D. program. I myself am getting into it partially for the stipend money. I think it's important to point out, however, that people are so casual in thinking that they can simply waltz into another non-academic job after the TT job hunt is a bust. Let's remember that job prospects across all of society are generally crap. 
 
You get a stable income for 5-6 years. And then what? I don't get why people keep wanting to clamp down on this conversation. Let's talk and plan more about this instead of just saying "it is what it is."

I don't think that much of what is being discussed here is useful or important honestly. It's just needlessly stirring the pot since this is literally a discussion that has been posted all across GC at least three separate times in the last three months.
What strikes me every time is a lack of perspective by some posters on how much "lost income" getting an English phd will cost us. This statement neglects the fact that the stipend offered may be more money than many have ever made. That it may provide them with a living wage.
There are benefits of getting a phd that are beyond landing an academic job, such as a sense of security for a minimum of 5-6 years with a living wage and health insurance. I'll certainly try to get a TT job after I finish, but if I don't my quality of life for those 5-6 years will certainly be better than it has been for the last 12 years of my working adult life or what it would be if I didn't do it at all.

If I get shut out, I will mourn by drinking.
If I get an acceptance, I will celebrate by drinking.

Our philosopher who art in Chicago,
hallowed be thy name.
Thy postings come,
thy blog be read,
in all programs as it is in top-10 one's.
Give us this day your daily post,
and forgive us our trepidations,
as we forgive those who trepidate against you,
and lead us not into temptation,
but deliver us from Zizek.
For thine is the blog,
and the rankings, and our thanks,
for ever and ever.
Amen.

I took a long break from GradCafe over the summer and early part of this semester, but now that I'm back I thought I'd share some data I collected that I think could help other people make a decision. 
 
I used department websites to get these numbers.  The APA collects some similar data but it is self-reported and incomplete, and I haven't seen any chart like this that can be used to compare different programs.  I've got data for the entire PGR top 50, as well as a few unranked schools I was interested in.  The first column (FTF) indicates how many full-time, Tenure or TT professors are in the department (so, this doesn't count lecturers, adjuncts, visiting professors, or affiliated professors in other departments).  The second column (GS) indicates how many grad students are in the department (both M.A. and Ph.D. students, for deprtments that offer both).  The third column is simply column 2 divided by column 1. 
 
How might this be useful?  It seems to me that everyone should care about column 3, which indicates how many grad students there are for each professor.  A high number here may cause concern that students will find it difficult to get the kind of intensive, one-on-one interaction with professors that is highly beneficial for graduate studies.  I think we can expect that, on average, professors in departments with a high number in column 3 will be less available to students than professors in a department with a low number.  As can be seen, there is quite a lot of variance in the student-teacher ratio at various programs - more than I expected. 
 
It also seems useful to  know the absolute size of departments, not just the student teacher ratio.  There are advantages and disadvantages to both small and large departments.  It's probably easier to feel a sense of community in small departments , while large departments probably offer more variety in courses and choice of dissertation advisors.  I would encourage applicants to consider what kind of department they would like to spend their time in - going to a huge department like CUNY is bound to be a very different experience than going to a small department like MIT, despite the fact that they have similar student/teacher ratios. 
 
(please forgive the wonky formatting - copy/pasting from excel doesn't work very well)
 
 
Name                          FTF      GS      GS/FTF
NYU                            27         42         1.6
Rutgers                       29         42          1.5
Princeton                     22         54         2.5
Michigan                     30          39         1.3
Harvard                       22          50         2.3
Pittsburgh                   19          47         2.5
MIT                            11           29         2.6
Yale                            25          39          1.6
Stanford                      27           58         2.1
North Carolina             25           33          1.3
Columbia                    23           71          3.1
UCLA                         17           50          2.9
USC                           23           34           1.5
CUNY                         40           95           2.4
Cornell                       19           46           2.4
Arizona                      26           30           1.2
UC Berkeley               24           49           2
Notre Dame                42           66           1.6
Brown                        16           31           1.9
Chicago                     23           57           2.5
Texas                        33           56           1.7
UC San Diego            23           38           1.7
Wisconsin                 22           43           2
Duke                        16           29           1.8
IU                             14           38           2.7
Ohio State                 20           40           2
Colorado                    25           43           1.7
Umass                      14           48           3.4
UC Irvine                   10           25           2.5
Penn                        14           40           2.9
Northwestern             19           38           2
UC Riverside             17           36           2.1
Maryland                   20           32           1.6
Miami                       14           27           1.9
WUSTL                    20           30           1.5
Georgetown              29           38           1.3
Johns Hopkins          12           34           2.8
Syracuse                  20           41           2.1
Virginia                     17           33           1.9
Carnegie-Mellon        17           35           2.1
UC Santa Barbara     11           28           2.5
Illinois @ Chicago      16           32           2
Washington              18           34           1.9
Boston                     22           47           2.1
Florida State             15           48           3.2
Rice                         12           22           1.8
UC Davis                  13           23           1.8
Minnesota                14           25           1.8
Rochester                15           21           1.4
Connecticut              19           31           1.6
Missouri                   16           29           1.8
Purdue                     20           47           2.4
Illinois @ U-C           13           30           2.3
Iowa                        13           22           1.7

You'll be fine. ETS sends scores in roughly 10-15 days. I would double check on the uni's website/admission pages. They usually mention the last dates you can take your GRE's by. Or email their admissions office.

http://magoosh.com/gre/2013/gre-scores-for-top-universities/

This is not exactly an answer to your question, but something to take into consideration nonetheless: the continent is not as continental as you'd think. (This is coming from someone born and raised on the continent with a background in continental philosophy). Scandinavia is almost completely focused on analytical philosophy, with the continentals retreating into literature departments. The Netherlands are moving in that direction as well. Even France is getting enthralled with Wittgenstein and Quine, and students at the Ecole Normale Supérieure are using formal logic to criticize Meillassoux (see here).
Manfred Frank recently raised an alarm over the disappearance of continental philosophy from Germany - Heidegger's old chair in Freiburg has been shut down to make room for a philosophy of language chair, and it's increasingly difficult to do serious continental philosophy in Germany. A good English language article here, and Frank's article in FAZ in German here. Frank suggests that the USA is now a better place to study continental philosophy than Europe is.
If your only reason to go to the continent is to do continental philosophy, you might be disappointed. Now of course there are exceptions, and just like in the States, there's some good universities that have a very strong continental department (Louvain and Essex come to mind, and there are certainly more).

sidebysondheim and thomasphilosophy have already got this covered, but a little additional anecdote for you: I know someone who not only took 2 years worth of gap year, but attempted to study in a different field at a different university for a few months in between. Ultimately, he dropped out of that program and returned to philosophy, where - he asserts - his short absence from the field and flirtation with another discipline did him no harm whatsoever on applications. He ended up getting into five of his eight (quite well-ranked) PhD programs.
I myself took a year between finishing my BA and heading to MA to work on application material, and when I mentioned it to faculty who had been on the admissions committee after I was accepted, literally none of them even realized the gap. I know it seems glaring to you because you're hypersensitive of its presence, but I second (third?) wholeheartedly the earlier advice in this thread: it won't matter a bit.

Let me preface with the disclaimer that I'm merely an undergraduate, so I cannot say I've left the country for graduate work. Nevertheless I hope I will not be begrudged this advice I can't help but offer. 
Something in particular struck me in your post:
On the basis of this information alone I would almost recommend that you go somewhere else for the sake of not being where you've spent your whole life. But I'll spare you the "be an adventurer" rhetoric and try to speak as objectively as possible about things.
Almost inevitably, if you want to succeed in academia, you're going to have to move away from home. Whether it's for your undergrad (as it was for me), for graduate studies, or when you finally land a job, you don't have an aristocrat's picking of location. Even a miracle-worker of a scholar who receives pleas from every good university in the world to join their faculty will need to choose from among those universities - and it's practically inevitable that the choice will take them away from home.
As for support systems, the ability to build and maintain these networks wherever you go and whoever you're around is critical to a healthy life. It is with no intent of harshness that I say now: your current support system will only last as long as the people in it happen to still be around you. And once someone leaves for whatever reason, you have to replace them. That is, for better or for worse, how the world runs.
Life comes with anxieties. Delaying them is an exercise in futility. Learning to cope with and overcome them is, on the other hand, a vital skill to develop. And who knows? A lot of anxieties are fear of unknowns. It may turn out not so bad in the end.
A lot of my classmates dealt with their separation from home very comfortably. For many of them it was almost a relief. Most now might call back weekly. I'm very attached to my mother so I still call her several times a day, and it was at first tough adjusting to her absence, but I got past it quickly enough and now the distance doesn't bother me (though I can't say the same for her, alas).
My point being, eventually you'll have to deal with homesickness, loss of support systems, et cetera. You don't achieve much by trying to set those ineluctable events aside for their later appearance. There is ultimately not a net profit for you there. But moreover, if you rule out graduate study abroad because of your anxieties, you risk losing so many opportunities which may otherwise open for you a plethora of doors. The pain of leaving home may last a few days, weeks, or even months, but education at an amazing institution specializing in your field will last you your lifetime. You would not regret it.

There are usually more good applicants than free spots. If you were near the top of the pool in year 1 but didn't make it, improving your application and applying again might just put you over the top. Having applied before should not hurt your chances, you might even be remembered as someone strong that unfortunately just didn't make it. If you were mediocre before, chances are no one will remember, or if you've significantly improved then someone might notice the improvement, but this can only be a positive thing. The only real way that having applied before will be held against you is if your first application was somehow inappropriate in some way that was sufficiently memorable (I assume that isn't the case), or if there is some inconsistency that raises a red flag (I'm going to go ahead and assume that you're not planning on distorting the truth in any way). Unless you do something outrageous, having applied before won't be held against you.

Reapply. It's exactly as TakeruK said: either they don't recognize you, in which case there's nothing to worry about. Or they do recognize you, and they recognize: a) you're serious about wanting to get into their program; b ) you've improved in the past year. Both those things are going to be advantageous.
I have been advised explicitly to reapply by the same people who turned me down last year. Now of course I don't know whether that's the usual course of business or an exception, but it does show that there is not necessarily a stigma attached to reapplying after a turndown.

Although there may be some weird field-dependent thing going on, I'm going to assume that the answer in Philosophy would not be different from another field.
In your World A and World B examples, I do not think you would be at any inherent disadvantage in World A. Given that there are a lot of applicants to each program, I'd consider these two potential scenarios that might happen in World A:
A1: The committee next year does not remember you so this is effectively World B. They might not remember you because there are way too many applications each year. Or, maybe the committee is different this year than last year. Or, maybe the committee's first pass at applications is to divide all of them across the X subcommittees and only those that make it through the first pass gets considered by the whole committee, and this year, your application goes to a different subcommittee. Or some other variant.
A2: Your application is remembered from last year. Maybe this is because you were a close decision and they agonized between you and another candidate. In this case, they will certainly be looking for differences. In your example Worlds, you say you have noticeably improved materials, so you should not be at a disadvantage in World A.
Sure, there could be other scenarios such as a committee mis-remembering who you are, or not actually reading your whole application and thus missing the improvements, but screwups like this can happen even in World B. 

Hi! You are right about my GRE grades. I think that is what I have and will not retake it. I will take your suggestions for SOP and talk about my passion for the research.

My situation is virtually identical to yours. I have an excellent Philosophy GPA, great GRE, even good recommendations, but I don't have the powerful writing sample I need for a top program.
All the advice I've received from professors and other students can be summed up in probably three points:
1. A gap year cannot hurt - admissions committees, at worst, will not care that you took the year
2. Used well, a gap year will help you - with time to improve your materials, such as your writing sample, as you mentioned
3. If you can fill the year with an MA (terminal or otherwise), that will probably help you even more, as admissions committees will see that you'll have that preparation (even if it's only in progress at the time of your application), and you can use your professors there to optimize your application materials
To this effect I'm hoping to do an MA at Toronto next year. Given the advice I've received I'd recommend to you that you at least take a gap year, and if possible do a preparatory MA.
If you don't think you have the best writing sample you can produce right now, and you believe that by waiting for the next application cycle you can make that best sample, do not waste your time with PhD applications this year. Take the year.

May as well apply to MAs, and if you're interested in Continental and already live in Atlanta, Georgia State seems like an obvious choice. LSU might also be a good fit. 

Yes, the same thing happens with GREs, however, they won't even look at your score. If you checked off (or forgot to uncheck, don't remember which) a box in your GRE signup, you will get a bunch of mail from schools asking you to apply to them. These schools are just random schools that want students and will come from all fields. All of my solicitations this way came from MBA programs, or other business schools (my field is planetary science). It's basically just spam/ad/junk mail and after doing it wrong the first time, I made sure to never do that again in future test signups!
The schools you actually send your scores to will not look at your GRE scores until you apply and they link them with your application. 

They don't mind gap years at all. It only becomes a red flag when it becomes 4, 5, 6, etc. years off.

Gap years are fine, don't sweat it. If you want more in-depth discussion, do a search on this forum (it's been discussed a lot).