Indeed, he's great.
Also, most teams are rushing from zone to zone by TT these days, so this is moot. Seriously though, this is pretty much our speedspeedspeed mentality run amok - which yes, is what speedspeedspeed would want (and yes I will admit to a bias against it as it seems to lead to lots of "come join my team while I solo this"). If you want to play this way or keep up with those who do, then you'll need to spend the time to get a badge from each zone, with or without Okami. I've done it myself (using a jetpack to avoid the purple bad guys) in about an hour. It doesn't really strike me as that onerous a requirement to speedspeedspeed in ways we didn't used to be able to. And I do have alts, a few pages of them.
ETA: I mean, we spend time planning builds, right? Running Mids, all that, and crafting, working the market to get whatever we need. This is just another one of those chores we have to put in to get out the massive pewpewpew we like.