Hmmm I don't think you'd get geo dist for free. For example, I don't think start of authority can be shared by multiple resolving servers. Or if it can, it's a feature of some specific dns implementation.

You get free caching which is tolerant to partitions, but you'd get that with either solution since it's largely the forwarding dns servers which make that happen and the difference here is constrained to the authorative resolving dns servers.