would you prefer i store a 60KB picture of my daughter's cat using 700 transactions or 1 transaction? 
What we prefer is for bitcoin to be used as it was meant to, meaning as a payment system not a distributed database where arbitrary data is being stored.The reason why OP_RETURN was introduced is to discourage exactly what you are doing (creating UTXO bloat) and the 80-byte limit is another discouragement telling you that bitcoin blockchain is not a place to store arbitrary data, even if you could.