Opinions: Separate Storage and Compute?

Not really. The research and experimentation thus far has been in the shape of “usable spikes” which assume the SSaC model is global. SSaC, if implemented, would be quite a departure from XTDB’s existing storage approach and would land in a 2.x series.

Regarding XTDB’s “sweet spot” I’ve forked the thread over here: XTDB's Sweet Spot