i have been using thirtybees for about a year now.. form prestashop 1.6x.. and I agree, thirtybees is the future of prestashop 1.6x users.. what I love about thirtybees is it doesnt have as many bugs as prestashop.. there are still bugs that we, developers, need to resolve.. but that goes with the territory of almost all open source.. as you said, "there is still a need for someone to fine tune the installation" to get better performance.. as far as database tables indexing.. no, I dont think thirtybees has added addidtional indexing.. it is basically same as prestashop 1.6x.
But overall, thirtybees checks the boxes for me..