To get back to the original question-- It is standard practice to start the frames at 10 (minimally spaced). This ensures straighter comb. After the comb is drawn out, and extracted a first time, you can begin spacing it to encourage the bees to build deeper cells. The deeper cells store significantly more honey per cell. This reduces the capping/spinning workload but at the same time making much heavier and more fragile (in the extractor) frames.
I don't see much of a rate of comb formation difference between foundation-less and foundation comb. I do see a much, much higher rate of wonky comb formation on foundation-less comb. *Especially* where there is no already drawn guide comb sandwiching the open frames. You can draw foundation-less comb and can extract it, but you need to be editing and triming the bees efforts as they form the comb. You should cull comb, and whole frames that are not even. A wonky comb will affect the frames next to the bad one, and those in turn will affect the ones next to them. You can end up with combs that have curves, holes, pockets, etc. This makes it significantly harder to cut caps. The uneven comb invites drone brood and queen cells. The uneven comb will have more bridging.
Uneven comb that is widely spaced often gets doubled- a fold of comb is created between frames. Straight comb gets deepened (as you are wanting to do). Wired foundation can take the forces to extract deepened comb, I'm not sure that first year open comb could -- too much weight and the wax is too thin, soft and delicate.
So the real advantage, to me, of foundation is the comb is much more organized, straighter, and easier to de-cap and otherwise manage. You can use an open frame system, but you need to be unstinting in the effort to cull bad comb. This is hard for the backyard keep to do, as they don't want to melt down all that effort.
So I am missing the point here-- you want spacing because why? For a hobbiest, the extra effort to decap and spin the 10th frame seems insignificant-- and its the efficiency of effort that is driving the spacing decision- which is an industrial scale concern. The deeper cells also risk attracting drone brood, whereas foundation drawn and tightly packed frames don't -- the drones are laid on the 2nd and 9th frames surrounding the brood nest.
I think there is a larger issue of chasing the "trendy" here. Beek's are inveterate tinkerers, why there are so many opinions and approaches. My suggestion is to start with a strictly "traditional" set-up -- this is your baseline, and add the newer "trendy" modifications slowly and one-by-one as you learn the craft. Similar to isolating car trouble or fixing a computer -- make only one change at time, or you have no way of knowing what the effect of each modification actually is.