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But the benefit of virtual memory is the contiguous memory (that those virtual indirections allows for) - ignoring virtual memory we risk falling down again to the "you need 600kb [of contiguous] conventional memory" issues of fragmented memory.

A MMU is complex, but allows simpler programs in the entire system overall.

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I agree that abandoning virtual memory entirely brings back old problems, but there is a middle ground of a single virtual address space. This limits flushes to page table changes and makes it easier to move the MMU out of the CPU cores/caches. Page table size issues can be mitigated by larger or mixed size pages (and already is in x86_64/ARM)

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