> "small-ish backoffice systems that never has to be web scale".
Doesn't production use of Datomic by Nubank and Netflix (to mention just two examples) belie this assertion?
Having the working set present on app servers means they don't put load on a precious centralized resource which becomes a bottleneck for reads. The peer model allows app servers to service reads directly, avoiding the cost of contention and an additional network hop, allowing for massive read scale.
Newer releases have improved significantly in this area. It's now possible to understand perf implications with the addition of io-stats[1] and query-stats[2].
Free beer binaries are not mutually exclusive of Enterprise support agreements featuring all those things you mentioned above _for people that need that_.