Mike, I think I understand your concerns. I agree with your statements about the reasons both to do-and not to do- order reconciliation. AC has finally made some changes to make the process easier, but we have not made the decision to incorporate them into our work flow as of yet so I cannot speak to how much they might influence your decision to reconcile.
In answer to your questions, as I noted above on my long post on 2/5/15, you can avoid adding orders to the reconciliation list by printing them without saving or sending.
The reduction in speed that comes from having many unreconciled orders was suggested originally by AC and has been described by users. On the other hand, I do not believe it is a common problem. If it were, that "slowing" would be much more common because so many people have thousands of unreconciled orders in their system.
If you prefer to do so, in the same post I describe how to delete those old orders, though sometimes people report problems with that process.
