Yes, the point with bringing up gluster is that synchronous replication is the best solution for our use case (we have relatively low amount of filesystem writes, but need the files to be consistently replicated near-instantly).

But for applications where async is a good fit, your solution does definitively seem much nicer than the inotify + rsync stuff we were doing (we ended up with that - temporary - solution after writing off lsyncd, though I don't remember why).