Yes, I agree. In MY own case I am oriented towards independent blogs instead of multisite install because, short version, unless there ACTUALLY IS some performance penalty, I prefer it. Longer version:
- I will do this on a VPS of which I am root, so I can customize it any way it is needed/I prefer
- so far, nobody (even in other places) has told me that using seven different wordpress installs each with its database, wrt 1 multisite+1db, the seven websites would be slower for users (also because, due to #1 I will be able to manage/consolidate caching, page compression and similar at the httpd server level, ie use less plugins in wordpress
- this is only my own (strong) feeling, but here it goes: wordpress plugin and themes are, in general, tested more in single installs than in multisite ones, so it is less likely to happen into bugs/untested situations if you stick to single installs
- Robustness: due to #1 again, I can do manual updates, i.e. check if something goes wrong, only on one blog and then: if it's OK, I do the same thing on all the others with wp-cli, automatically; if it goes bad, I only have one broken blog to fix
Does it make sense? If I overlooked something, please let me know