VAR's won't mix in with your game files, which makes them easier to remove, and the author can use any file path they want to.
VAR files are just compressed archives, which is why your extracting software can open then. The need to decompress the VAR files in game does increase load time, while not much, the system is there to save on storage space.
The issue is that 90% of the creators using the VAR system make it extremely difficult on everyone else. There is no standard for them, they put their scene's dependencies in all the wrong places. IE, putting textures in the saves folder. It works fine in a VAR, but if you choose to extract it because you don't care about storage space, you have to manually fix the missing pieces when they fail to load. (Only if you care about keeping all of the files in the correct locations for your own use.)
I don't think RAM will have a big effect on VAM's overall performance, VAM memory usage only gets high after being in game for too long, and loading tons of shit. VAM needs a hard reset after you've loaded a bunch of scenes anyway.
I am officially over 200GB in my VAM folder. Half of that is just in clothing and textures. It takes me over 60 seconds to load a person atom on the first launch. My PC is not a potato either. At this point I say fuck it, 2.0 will be released soon(tm) enough, and we can all move on from the problems with this build.