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.
just found this paper from 2019 has discussed whether metadata negatively impact on the effectiveness of Bitcoin with respect to its primary function, including different methods containing UTXO bloat and OP_RETURN, hope this can provide more perspectives~~
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Livio-Pompianu/publication/330385593_A_Journey_into_Bitcoin_Metadata/links/5e3990baa6fdccd96587d6df/A-Journey-into-Bitcoin-Metadata.pdf