I am shocked this got so few upvotes. This is great material and very valid criticisms. I had no idea Merkle branches are 4x longer because of redundency.
I wonder if Google has influenced the decision to use Leveldb which affected the size of the blockchain.
I can't believe the level of detail and analysis you put into this. Is it all original work or some cut and paste? If original you should be getting a ton of praise. It may be too complicated for the regular Steemit reader. Stay strong!