I don't understand why you think utilising RAID across EBS volumes is insane. For years, if people needed more IOPs than a single drive could deliver, they utilised RAID to acheive it. How is this any different?
In order for raid-on-ebs to truly perform well you have to setup per-volume monitoring that ejects volumes from the raidset (and runs in degraded mode) when they start performing 10x worse, and then rebuilds the back on to it (or a new one) later. It becomes a rather arcane wizard work contraption of on-the-fly raid config changes, which IMHO qualifies as "insane".