Olly, welcome to the forums. Indeed what you propose is a "sensible" approach to water-cooling. Need to appreciate the different sub-markets that exist within water-cooling though. If all everyone wanted to do was to achieve a quiet but practical cooling solution with water, we'd all be running Eheim 1046 pumps with blocks with a few parallel channels and a semi-passive radiator sitting in the lower-front of the case whose only air-flow came from the PSU and a couple of case-fans sucking air out of the case.
It also comes down to what you want to achieve with your water-cooling. For some when overclocking hard, the difference between acceptable water-cooling and top-end water-cooling may very well be as much of a 10% overclock. Admittedly 10% may not be all that user-visible, but if it folds faster, crunches data faster, and gives higher frame-rates, then this is the sort of "reward" that these people are looking for with high-flow systems.
For some people, the ability to buy a $200-250US water-cooling system that can offer better gaming performance (through better cooling of the CPU and GPU) than a $1000US phase-change setup which only cools the CPU is their goal, and if buying a better block brings them that much closer to what a phase-change unit can do, without the $1000 price-tag, then that's also where the reward lies.
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