To what extent can the tree system be used instead of the details system

To what extent can "trees" that are flowers (or even grass) be used instead of Unity's detail system?

The main benefit from using them as trees is, you can see them from a much greater distance, especially with billboarding.

I'm not necessarily talking about using the tree system as as a full blown substitute for dense grass. I realize that's not really what it's best at. But:

Trees are visible from much further away.

They are editable within Unity.

Internally...from what I understand, Unity has a huge array of tree instances that it just iterates through and draws depending on visibility.

But, with the detail system, each "tile" or pixel of the terrain has a certain amount of a particular detail. If you have multiple details painted on a tile (something pretty common), the system has to iterate through the details present for each "pixel". This seems a bit more convoluted, though it may work fine. Also...seems like the detail system uses a lot more memory. If you have 8 different details, that is two different splats. Unity has to check 8 different details, to see if any of them are present for EACH pixel. The trees just have one entry in an array, and Unity draws it.

So...dense grass probably isn't a good use of it. But take a lot of cattails around a pond, or a marsh. I honestly don't know that I would use a detail mesh instead of a cattail tree.

Any thoughts on this, as far as performance and such?