It will likely be several months before a new version will be publicly available. We are just beginning development.
Unfortunately, even if you don't use inventory, the database structure is set up to support it and you will run into this limitation.
By creating 8 products as suggested, it will make it 8x faster to load an individual page, but you will still have 4 to the power of 7 iterations, which would probably still slow things considerably.
You shouldn't have to account for it "everywhere"... you should only need to account for the updates in the admin section when updating options and in the details page, but that isn't to imply it would be simple for someone without pretty extensive knowledge of code and database design to figure it out.