Is there a runtime comparison of the shaders needed? Seems like you might have to do a lot of texture sampling if you have to walk the ray through the data but maybe there's a trick?

MSDF is pretty much just the target texel in question plus the surrounding samples in a way the GPU can do entirely upfront before the math starts. (M)SDF glyphs also play nicely with mip mapping and I would think this Slug algorithm needs uncompressed data. Maybe that doesn't matter because you just don't scale the data ever?