>direct access to the block device
And that's more or less a thing that is in widespread use right now! https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filesystem_in_Userspace
And that's more or less a thing that is in widespread use right now! https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filesystem_in_Userspace
I'm also not aware of any FUSE filesystems that directly access block devices. They usually have network or other filesystem backends.