Great point. I had not considered the angle you raised in the second paragraph — it reframes the whole thing for me.

One caveat for larger communities: keep an eye on the indexes. At a few thousand rows the difference is night and day.

For what it is worth, the same approach works with the PMPro adapter — the membership side is identical from here.

I respectfully disagree on one detail. In my setup the opposite held true, though I suspect it comes down to community size.