??

1- NFS performance is amazing. It isn't the protocol you have performance problems with it is the transport (layer 1 or layer 2). The protocol in a transport might make a couple % points difference, and that even rarely.

The transport is where it is at. Comparing gigabit with FC is a losing battle for NFS, but compare 10G with FC (even 8G FC) and you have NFS at the top of the performance heap right now for mass storage, only iSCSI is in the same ballpark- but it is also on... 10G ethernet. iSCSI also cannot do simultaneous reads/writes like POSIX compliant NFS can. Direct attach is miserable because you invest loads in disk and can only use it on one server. What if you want to share that data around? Replicate? Islands of storage?

2) use automounter. Seriously, this hasn't been a problem for 5-10 years. Automounter, hostnames, don't use IP addresses (better if you can reverse the addresses).

You obviously haven't maintained NFS either recently or in a large environment.

NFSv4 does things your post doesn't even mention (security and ACL improvements, some performance in some cases).