Really got a kick out of this article. RAM is big, and cheap. And as we all know the database is the log, and everything else is just the cache. A few questions, comments!
1. I take it you've seen the LMAX talk [0], and were similarly inspired? :)
2. Are you familiar with the event sourcing approach? It's basically what you describe, except you don't flush to disk after editing every field, you batch your updates into a single "event". (you've come at it from the exact opposite end, but it looks like roughly the same thing).