I hate to say it again, but I think the designers had already found very early on that ONLY ballbaring blocks will hold up. This goes for the top halyard block as well as the bottom one, not to mention all other blocks related to halyards/retrieval line and sheets. There is sadly no cheap solution here. What happens with non ball baring blocks is that thy work fine in test setups till the moment just a little sand, dust or salt gets stuck between the axis and the sheave. Then the non-ball baring block jams up under load and within a few meters of pulling the dyneema halyard line over a stagnant sheeve, you made the sheeve square. From that moment it gets increasingly worse with each hoist. The ball baring blocks allow to rinsing out of dust, sand and salt while to non-ball baring blocks just don't.

A solution to thick fingers when using my hoisting method is to make a slip knot in the halyard line and then put the bottom part of the mainsail luff in the sail track. Now the halyard will stay outside of the mast as the knot is too large to pass between the sail and the track. The exces halyard can then still be pulled out from the bottom of the mast and you'll end up with only a small thingy on the outside of the sail-feed. This should solve any issues with this hoisting method.

Wouter