People merrily put up with inefficient bikes for all sorts of reasons. If the only objective was to get between two points with minimal energy expenditure, everyone would be riding road bikes. Clearly other factors come into play.
So, yes, people do care and want solutions to these trade-offs, and the current landscape already has decent answers to these concerns. IMO this chainless one would need to prove itself to be a lot better on some other dimension than pure maintenance.