Slide is not adequate, as that's a totally different thing. Pitch-bend can do way more. Slide just ... well ... it's just sliding between two notes. Can't do vibrato for instance. Or trills. Which is something the touch-strip pitch-bend is WONDERFUL for.
Again, we're talking kilobytes here, not megabytes. MIDI CC, PB, MW, and AT were developed in the 80s when 64KB was a large amount of RAM ... for a computer, not to mention a synth. The data was MEANT to be stored in small amounts of memory, because it had to be. I do not see how memory could possibly be an issue. A single step in the sequencer can't possibly be more than a couple few kilobytes. If it's more than that ... well .... Very poor design decisions were made.
How much memory (or lack thereof) does the KSP have anyhow? In RAM terms.