Of course if you want performance (eg for games) you should go for shape keys. What I am aiming for really is getting quick believable deformations for animations and still images. Because I know there are many who hate corrective shapekeys with a burning passion. Who knows, maybe I will figure out a way to implement baking for the deformations 
Not really, the timing of the raycast is added to the node you are connecting it to.
I know many of you would like to get some performance numbers.
I am on a laptop with Windows, NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1650, AMD Ryzen 5 4600H, 8 GB RAM. I have some optimisations in mind which might improve the performance. Again, you don’t have to enable the modifier while editing. You can set it render only.