UCA doesn't mess anything up, and
UCA is much worse than the read-only trick. While the read-only trick is pretty much only possible because Torque doesn't have a proper error handling system, it's
much better than the way UCA does it.
Oh, and yes, UCA does cause many more write cycles for SSD hard-drives, shortening their lifespan (since every overridden file is rewritten 2 times per launch, which also means that it's slower).