Optimizing Distinct Count Excel Reports

I wonder how many people believe that Tabular DistinctCount outperforms Multidimensional judging by Excel reports alone. In this case, an insurance company reported a performance degradation with Excel reports connected to a multidimensional cube. One report was taking over three minutes to run and it was requesting multiple fields on rows (insured, insured state, insured city, policy number, policy year, underwriter, and a few more) and about a dozen measures, including several distinct count measures, such as claim count, open claim count, and so on. The report would only need subtotals on three of the fields added to the ROWS zone. The cube had about 20 GB a disk footprint so the data size is not the issue here. The real issue is the crappy MDX queries that Excel auto-generates because they are asking for subtotals for all fields added to ROWS, using the following pattern: