>Furthermore, all of these tests must be over a LAN with large tables.

No reason to raise such a qualification that late in the argument;-)))

With "my" app that was not the case: munging across the fastest disks available, also with special code in place to put index and data file on separate physical platters for the most used write heavy files (some of them on a real RAM disc, was before SSD became common place, with table based lookup of where for what configuration the index file had to be opened). Also some of the data files were packed on disk, others not: division mostly due to R/W differences in typical usage during the runs.

Numbers showed better perf with A FEW more binary indices.