What do you mean inefficiency. We use the bulk upload feature and do billions of puts in an hour and our scans can go against 3 billion rows an hour. HBase scales linearly and we are already operating it on 5 times what we had designed it for
Really we went the exact other way for one of our use cases which required table scans and spark just lost. HBase just stores bytes in sorted order and once you know how to optimize for storage lots of wins can be achieved. I guess the use case here was aggregation so can definitely see some spark advantages.
Investing money into raising the capability level of these rich states usually has a very low success ratio mostly because their societies do not value labor but authority, power and money of which they have plenty.