Be more than a bit mindless to put expensive tackies without puncture protection on your bike on our roads here in Ireland.
As for puncture protection "sapping performance", I don't see it, at least not on properly designed tyres. The three big secondary advantages of banding tyres is that the stiff contact surface sticks a lot of rubber to the road, that the softer sidewall possible with a good protection band conforms that protection band consistently to the road's undulations, and that on wider tyres the lower inflation pressure possible sticks even more rubber more conformingly to the tarmac. Every auto racer knows -- and I don't know why it is so difficult to explain to bicyclists -- that keeping the tyre's contact patch as flat and large on the road as possible makes for less rolling resistance and thus better power transfer. In technical, engineering terms, the power transfer between tyre and road is limited by the friction between the materials, same as in braking, so the larger the surface in constant contact between tyre and road, the greater the power transfer possible.
The case against the protection band, given only that it is competently designed and installed, is its weight (pretty much irrelevant unless you're racing in the TdF) and its image among the roadies, nothing more.
The same arguments underlie the case for treadless tyres for tarmac use (and most other bicycle applications as well) for which even the great Jobst Brandt, trying to explain to bicyclists on a socalled "tech" group, suffered considerable frustration. Those landmark treadless Avocet tyres that the senior roadies here will remember were designed by Jobst.
