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Interesting. Wonder why I can't find many particular Japanese references for the 'sitting' angle, as the Chinese kanji orgin is obviously referring to sitting...wonder if it was a case of meaning-changed-when-imported-to-Japan...?
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Probably something like that. The same thing happened in China - both zhongwen.com, as you noticed, and my ABC Chinese-English dictionary (one of the best ones currently available for modern Mandarin) fail to mention anything about sitting, and it is a secondary or tertiary meaning in Matthews, which is more modern but has some classical in it. So the meaning of "sitting" probably stopped being the main one between fifteen hundred and two thousand years ago (very rough armchair estimate without much evidence to back it up). The education of samurai, however, if they got any, would have been based on reading mostly Chinese Confucian texts, so they would have absorbed some of the archaic (Zhou and Han dynasty) meanings of characters as well as more current/modern ones (Tang, Song and Yuan dynasties). And then over time in Japan, the original meaning of sitting probably just died off, like you mentioned.
So it's probably safe to assume that whoever created the term iai, which was probably no later than the 14th century with the Katori Shinto ryu (anyone know for sure? this is a guess), had been educated by studying classical Chinese. That can also be seen by the fact that the term is used as a Chinese compound, with the Japanese versions of the Chinese pronounciations (onyomi) being used instead of the purely Japanese pronounciation (kunyomi).
To be honest, however, that may not be an entirely reliable way of looking at the compound, since I'm not sure how well onyomi and kunyomi usage correllates with Chinese influence. Aesthetics and euphony (is that a word?) also sometimes play a part in which readings of characters are used.
Now I'm tired. I should stop using the computer after about 8 pm. I start rambling at about 9 pm.
I think I've also exhausted my resources for looking at these characters. Thanks for the exchange - it's been fun for me, and I hope it has also been for you, regardless of whatever difference of interpretation we both end up with.