[ajsalminen]

Well, I probably haven't seen the marketing you're referring to if it all happened before even that prerelease but people have kept talking about the BFS features for decades now and the interest is certainly not all based on some early marketing.

Yes it is a trade off. Not sure what other file systems you are referring to but I'm not aware of any others that enable the kind of applications BeOS had using these features. Those are also a key part of it.