I wonder how much it would hinder the bees using half depth frames for the brood, with all the extra gaps this will make in the brood nest.
I'm leaning towards making a long hive that takes deeps, and using these 'quarter size' boxes for the honey. The thing with half depths is you can hang a deep down through two half depth boxes, but you can't put two half depth frames into the deep :-\ I'm pretty sure dad wants to use a queen excluder anyway, so it could work well.