Flooring help, please?

I have a flooring issue that I need to address and welcome any suggestions, thoughts, comments, etc. that you may have.

My workshop is in the basement. As a result, I generate a lot of sawdust and other debris. Presently, the basement is carpeted. Imagine the problems that this causes. It's a lot of work to vacuum all that debris out of the carpet.

My plan had been to simply remove the carpet. It was glued down over existing 12x12 vinyl flooring by the previous owner. The glue texture looks and feels awful - leaving it as-is is simply not an option. I tried scraping it off and while that helped with the texture, the dark yellow of the glue is too ugly for A. to tolerate. Given all that she puts up with, this is really saying something.

I'm looking for some way, any way, to cover the existing vinyl tile on the floor and provide a surface that will be durable and easy to sweep. Durability is important, as tools and lumber will accidentially fall off of work surfaces onto the floor.

One candidate I'm considering is Armstrong Excelong vinyl tile. It's available in a wide variety of colors, looks great, is durable, and is reasonably priced, at 69 cents a square foot. Installation is more complicated than many other floors, however. Further, since so many great colors are available, I'm highly inclined to make some really itneresting patterns, which will involve cutting the tile and the expenditure of far more time.

Another idea was to put an epoxy garage floor over the existing tile. However, this fails because the expoxy requires an extremely clean surface to bond - and I can't get the existing vinyl that clean.

A third idea was floating laminate floor. While this sounds nice, and would work well when the room eventually (twenty years hence) becomes the billiards room, I doubt it would be durable enough for the purposes of my workshop. Further, I imagine that sawdust would collect in the ridges.

Overall, we're talking about 650 square feet of flooring. I cannot remove everything in the space - there are some things, like workbench, which have been built into the space. Ideally, the solution would cost $1 or less a square foot. I welcome any solutions and ideas, no matter how bizarre.