I'm a bit late to this post, but my experience using the approach that you outline has one main problem - you have to shut down the service to rebuild the locators. However, if the locators are in an Enterprise GDB, that is not the case.
When this discussion was taking place, Bug NIM-099335 was just a few months old. Almost a year since this bug was reported, it is still an issue (for 10.2.2.).
It's frankly frustrating to have to implement a complicated workaround for something that could be accomplished two versions prior (10.0).
I totally get that file GDB is a single-user data set and enjoys less overhead, etc. But shutting down services to rebuild indices is inefficient if you like to automate such tasks (I do).
Incidentally, I'm not rubbishing your suggestion - it's a great way to avoid the issues involved in this bug and like I said, I do use it in production. But, my goal when upgrading to 10.2.2. was to automate as much as possible and shutting down services requires a password to be passed - which implies that to script it, it has to be stored somewhere. Yes, there are ways to encrypt, etc., but all of this to avoid a bug that has been on the books for almost a year.
Sorry, Esri, if this has been fixed and I've missed it. But the bug report says it's still open.
Cheers.