dells_of_bittersweet

Just got into UW Madison! My premature panic was unwarranted. 

You are not being overly ambitious. You have at least some chance at every one of those schools. Seize the opportunity and see what comes of it. You need to cover all your bases though. You have some very hot and very cold parts of your application. Your GPA is a problem, the ranking of your undergrad institution is a problem, and your time out of school could be considered a problem. On the other hand, you have great research experience and results. 
You need exceptional LORs to get into the schools you have listed. You might get them. You might not. You won't know because most professors don't share letters with you. If you have any doubt about any of them ask "can you write me a strong recommendation" before you put them down on the app. 
With the risks inherent in your application, I recommend casting a wide net. The schools you have listed are ranked between 6 and 41 on US News and World Report. That's a pretty good spread. I recommend adding one more school ranked 40 or below for security purposes. Vanderbilt, Boston College, Colorado State, USC, Arizona State, UC Riverside, and Notre Dame are all respected programs where you might have high odds of admission. 
With a wide net of top ranked schools and good but easier to get into schools, you should at least get in somewhere. 
Don't let money blind you into mortgaging your future. With GRE submission fees and application fees, you can estimate around $100 for each application. But what's $500 or even $1500 in the grand scheme of the rest of your life? Be parted from the money and be thankful for the opportunity to have invested it in your future. In my experience, I applied to 8 programs with so far only 1 acceptance and 2 I haven't heard from. The one I got accepted into was actually ranked in the middle of all the schools I applied to. Putting my finger into a lot of different pots was definitely worth it. I recommend that you apply to at least as many schools as I did. 
Finally, I'll say that working in industry for a while is unlikely to significantly increase the strength of your application and is likely to make your letter writers slowly forget their fond memories of you. With your background and experience, your ambition will be rewarded with an acceptance somewhere. I recommend that you apply for 2017, cast a wide net, hope for the best, have somewhere you can get in for sure, and start researching schools. 
Go through the faculty pages of every school in the Top 25 and see who has multiple faculty doing research that you think is exceptionally interesting and impactful. Apply to those schools. Do the same thing for at least a handful of schools ranked 25-60 to select your safety schools. 
Also skim read the past year of JACS and note who is doing really cool research. 

Well guys according to results forum last year MIT sent out half their rejections one day and half their rejections the next day. No acceptances after rejections posted. Looks bad.