There are dual-knob coaxial setups that are only slightly bigger than a single knob as well. I've seen them mainly used in a course and fine adjustment setup, but you could certainly use them as atten+offset.
Totally. Also, an attenuator is easier and cheaper to implement, because it just requires normalizing V+ into the jack plug. An offset requires an adder.
My preference is: attenuator < offset < attenuator + offset. I see no benefit of having to remove the knob to get to the jack as proposed in the article.