> Anecdotally, on my own site of about ~1k daily
    > active users, the no-www urls were used almost
    > exclusively.

Not sure what this is supposed to prove. You should be redirecting one to the other, so it doesn't matter if people find it more convenient to manually type in one form over the other unless you're telling me you're trying to optimize out the redirect, which seems just as specialized as using www- for TFA's DDoS concerns.

I type in "google.com" every time and don't care that it redirects me to "www.google.co.uk" every time. I don't even notice.