If your use case simply involves editing text files so that they are in sync with the remote server then OpenAFS does seem to be overkill. SSHFS [1] would be the simplest solution to this. It works well for small files but not well with large ones due to its synchronous nature.
The main reason we chose OpenAFS was the security model. However, from what I've read it seems to be based on Kerberos 4, which is out-of-date and has problems. It's also difficult to maintain a OpenAFS cell and requires a separate Kerberos authentication server.
I'm basically looking for a more modern DFS that implements better user-based security.