I know USB booting on pi is still not perfect, but it almost seems to make more sense at this point to boot off of a decent USB flash drive, I would think? If you get a decent brand with good benchmarks, I would think that reads/writes would blow all SD cards away. What I'm not sure about is latency or lifespan, though I would think _good_ USB flash drives are likely to be better quality flash than SD, without really being significantly costly in comparison?

I say this as someone that uses SD cards currently, and I understand if others do also- it's the easiest/default option, but I've definitely given thought to switching