Thanks. Your answers are very much on point and helpful.
Love to see good communities around projects like these. Strong community support can often be just as important as the software.
I totally agree rclone and CD compliment one another more than compete. I understand the fundamental difference in the technical approach, and it's definitely a trade-off either way you slice it I think my ideal solution would be to run both - using rclone for the flexibility, speed and accessibility, while having CD as an option for when very low-level compatibility is needed. While the WinFSP/FUSE mounting rclone uses is for the most part pretty solid there's always a few edge-case apps that require workarounds to work optimally. It would be interesting to see how CD handles these. A primary storage pool with CD or CD/local combination + a daily file-level backup with rclone to a secondary I think would be really powerful and combine many of the benefits of both, so that's something I'd love to experiment with.
I think I was hesitant to check out the 30-day trial before I knew more because I'd be "wasting" my time (30 days to iron the finer details of a long-term storage solution tend to go by fast) but... I'm probably being stupid and should just run the 30-day on a VM and do some tests there. Hopefully the trial works on machine-ID and doesn't hook into your account or something like that?
Shame about the Teamdrive support though. That's where most of my storage is right now, but it's something I might look into changing if the performance results look good enough.
I have a fairly good understanding of the technical differences between teamdrives and personal drives on Gdrive, and there's not actually that many big ones. I'd love to learn more about what spesific limitations makes CD unsuitable for Teamdrives. Although - that might be a topic for another time unless you are feeling particularly inclined (or maybe know of a good existing thread on the topic).
Thanks again for the help :)
-Stigma