I liked your revised approach of letting SQL pick proper index and help speed up performance.  The goal for this approach was totally eliminate the need to “maintain any sort of counters” and I think I have mentioned that the solution I proposed is for a small to medium size operation, believe it or not it always worked for me since about 8 years

I will give it another shot using CLR integration and see how much does it makes difference.

Regards,

Asif