1. Read Committed is not that restrictive to be honest. If you're short on memory it can be an issue but even in a high frequency system it should only lock at the row level. Beyond that, why would you be pushing to read dirty data? That's an issue in and of itself.
8/9. Arrays? JSON? XML? It's not relational data. Either parse it or put it in a different system, no RDBMS is going to handle these very well because they break the 'Relational' part. They might be accomodated, but trying to work with them is not a good idea in the vast majority of cases. I'm promoting SQL here and I still have to point out that SQL handles XML like crap too, try and index an XML blob.