Seems to me, you could archive similar benefits by generating your HTML server-side on request (the classic pre-ajax way to do things) but also allowing your generated pages to be cached.

I guess the challenge would then be cache management, as you'd have to return Last-Modified or ETag headers for dynamically generated pages - meaning you'd have to hit the database to populate those headers.

However, seems to me, this could still be less work than statically generating everything up-front.