Yes: you don’t need to generate as many streamlines, only to discard the vast majority (which is how SIFT works). This is what we would now recommend for pretty much any quantitative connectomics analysis. The only case where SIFT is still required is for the statistics in fixel-based analysis (when performed on the template), but I have a feeling that may also change soon. No doubt @rsmith will clarify if I’ve forgotten situations where that’s not the case.
I’m not sure what you’re referring to here. Presumably you’re talking about the absence of reversed phase-encoded data to perform distortion correction…?