I disagree with your disagree, LOL. Let me show you in pictures what I'm talking about. I said 5yrs because that's what I gave this little guy after purchasing it in the 1st pic. As you can see not much to work with except foliage, not much in the way of branching, pretty much like the tree in question. Sure there's a few thick branches but nothing to give it any real shape. The 2nd pic is what the tree looked like after 5yrs of just growing, nothing else. At that point I could see where I was going to end up going, in fact I let the tree show me where it wanted to go in pic 3. After that you can see the progression which was probably another 2yrs of pinching to shape and giving it pads. I don't think it was a waste of time for approx. 7yrs to get a great looking little tree, wouldn't you agree? As I said above and I'm sure most would agree that a really nice bonsai takes time and patience, and yes it's nice to plan ahead, just stick with the plan and be patient.
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Your pictures seem to be doing a good job of illustrating my point. The design potential seen in picture 2 was already present in picture 1. In fact, it appears that you only rotated somewhere between 5 and 10 degrees in the ground plane and tilted about 20 degrees to the right from the position in picture 1 to pick the front in picture 2. You could indeed have picked the front from the beginning, started shari development if you had wanted to have shari on this tree, and done initial root work to set the preferred planting angle and begin the journey toward nice radial nebari (and could've planted it in the ground to grow for the next 5 years).
I feel like perhaps you are under the mistaken impression that I am advocating for doing a bunch of branch pruning at the start. I am not. Doing a bunch of pruning would indeed slow down growth. What I am advocating is:
1. Study the tree and pick a front. Formulate some sort of a plan in your mind.
2. Decide if you want to develop shari and get started with that if you do. (It's not going to do much of anything to slow down growth for you to start a thin shari that you gradually widen a little bit each year thereafter.)
3. Decide what you're going to turn into a jin, so you can think about how the live portion of the tree needs to develop for your ultimate design. You don't have to actually jin it now though. You can leave that section untouched so that it contributes energy to the tree and helps thicken the trunk.
4. Do a minimal amount of branch selection as you go along, just enough to prevent inverse taper from forming.
5. Do root work initially to set the planting angle (or least move toward what your ultimate planting angle is going to be -- if it's a big change, you're not going to do it all in one go).
6. Let it grow, grow, grow. Bend branches along the way if that's what's needed to carry out your vision.
. Also plant in larger growing container or ground 
