another long answer warning - sorry 
Yes we will push through Alpha regardless of data chains. It may mean restricted access to vaults, but the main push we will make here is clients and API’s to enrich the application developers experience. We will need data chains or possibly a simpler process to ensure we can handle the low power / resource vaults. We (this community in test7) proved that very low power vaults (or so many per LAN they become low power). So we will run networks with droplet nodes for all the client apps and API’s initially.
We will run the parallel data destroying tests in a separate network (that people can join) as we move along. I expect the parallel network to be very much Wild West as the RFC’s get implemented. The end game though will be we get to full feature much faster. At the moment we are fighting a battle we cannot win and also tests that must annoy people. I personally do not want to lean too heavily on the communities good spirits to keep killing their networks and data. So we will stabilise releases and keep the more gritty stuff in parallel until the network can handle the smaller nodes.