Well, your data denormalization was broader in scale than mine. That alone does cut down a good deal on the number of queries that are necessary.

Your statements about the traffic are a bit off, though. One query returning 50 records on one switch port to one other switch port (your app frontend that needs the results) is more efficient use of your network than 50 queries each returning one result as individual TCP streams back to your one port on the frontend. Remember that these are multiplied by your concurrent users, so 10 users making a 50 record query with one record per server means 50 * 10 queries and 50 * 10 responses with all the overhead of each of those. You could have 50 overall queries to 50 servers and 50 overall responses, even though they are 50 times the size.