I particularily like the good point you are making here: maybe the tower is strong enough to hold the gravitational forces when the aerodynamic forces are so huge anyways. Why use a belt when conductive wires are so amazing. Seems we fall back to this discussion about how to transfer power and in which form it should take. I believe strongly that electrical energy as soon as possible and then use wiring is the correct answer for 99% of designs. And people are not really paying anymore to lift water out of their well.
Anyways, another reason that high towers like this may become difficult to build is that such long towers require very high stiffness to avoid oscillations to occur. This is an advantage of AWE, as the tower (tether) is basically massless