I really want to believe, but if I had a penny for every time that analog, optical, ternary, clockless, or other radically non-standard computing paradigms were supposed to revolutionize the industry... I'd have a nice pile of pennies.

Electronic signaling is just so marvelously easy to scale that the right path was clear pretty much from day one. We don't have that path for other operating principles right now. As for synchronous operation, binary signaling, and so forth, they're once again just scaling tools that let us crank out designs with billions of transistors without hand-crafting every piece or making the abstractions more leaky than they already are.