Blacklists weren't exactly a great solution to start with.
I would like it if the largest players in email (Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, AOL) got together to organise the creation of an independent not-for-profit organisation which would run a public whitelist. They could set a cut off date after which they would no longer accept email from non-whitelisted addresses.
Email admins who don't usually pay much attention would suddenly notice their mail being rejected, would be forced to register on the whitelist, and would ideally implement the db themselves on their systems.
The difficult part would be deciding how IPs get onto the whitelist and under what circumstances they are removed. And its day to day management of course.
Blacklists catch far more spam than bayes, are far easier to administer and far less resource intensive. Personally, I try to deploy both, with blacklists first in line, then bayes to catch some stuff that the blacklists miss.
"Sender authentication" is a vague term. If you mean verification of the sender address via various DNS lookups, then yes, that's quite useful, but still nowhere near as useful as blacklists.
This is how I see people setting up their spam filters in the industry. It might not be idealistic, but it is effective and wide spread.
SPF and DKIM are good for preventing some false positives. They're not good for stopping spam.
I would bet that currently, well over 90% of spam that is rejected, is rejected because of blacklist lookups.