If the decision to abandon strong consistency involved careful analysis of the performance/maintenance trade-offs, then by definition the lack of consistency is

If the decision to abandon strong consistency involved careful analysis of the performance/maintenance trade-offs, then by definition the lack of consistency is less expensive than keeping a consistent but low-performance model, and you're just paying the price of having to solve a Hard Problem. But if strong consistency was abandoned because someone wrote general statements in favor of eventual consistency...