Your 'Less Performant' paragraph seems to misunderstand where the big CPU hit happens: It happens with database inserts (which require mining a valid nonce), no

Your 'Less Performant' paragraph seems to misunderstand where the big CPU hit happens: It happens with database inserts (which require mining a valid nonce), not with verifies (which only require verifying that a transaction block has a specified hash). So reads/verifies are fast, but inserts/updates/deletes are slow. Also, the mining parameters can be tuned to make it easier/faster to do an insert, at a tradeoff of a larger blockchain history for initial clients to process and more orphans (See litecoin, which has a 2.5min block processing target). So I think you should consider that a 'tuning parameter' based on your application, more than a set-in-stone disadvantage.