Intercepting touch events for Android

I would like to create an overlay that catches all touch events, logs them, but is mostly transparent and allows touch events (and all other gesture) to interact with the underlying applications.

What I have tried so far are the solutions suggested here.

Android overlay to capture ALL touch and transfer them?

Android: Multi touch and TYPE_SYSTEM_OVERLAY

but I can either have "transparent", which allows all touch events to be passed to the main applications, or an overlay that intercepts all touch events without letting them "miss".

For what I've read and tried so far, this appears to be a security limitation from Android 4.x, and it may not be able to be done at all.

I'm open to any solution, so maybe there is a way to make this work as root, or with the NDK, or dunno, whatever, since I'm completely new to Android programming.