Thanks Patrick for you post.
I think this would be the ideal solution for us and I think for many European databases. It is very hard to explain why they should through away a very high percentage of data.
The history table or history off observations are clearly suboptimal and would introduce more complicated logic than necessary. The proposed solution is the best of both worlds and for me the best and actually only real solution to the problem.
So 10 points from The Netherlands for this solution 