With your FAA's recommendation of lower/tighter gyro patterns than airplanes, this can set up a gyro pilot having to either turn in front of an airplane on base, or extend the gyro's downwind. Meaning, the absence of long straight-in approaches does not completely mitigate pattern risk of disparate speed aircraft when the gyro doesn't daisy-chain follow the aircraft in front of him. There is no "one-size-fits-all" solution, which is why I believe that inter-pilot communication and the flexibility to occasionally extend downwind or perform a 360 for separation is required for safe airmanship. Merely flying box patterns hundreds of times at a local field, always making turns over the same landmarks, is rote work, not flying, and creates a sort of blindness to anything not fitting the "norm." Such pilots are often reluctant to extend downwind past their familiar reference point. (Their base and final turns would then be over strange territory, and their descent would be different. Such could rattle a tyro.)
With two small Cessnas in repetitive closed pattern, and the 340 entering the pattern on the 45, either the 152 or the Skyhawk would have had to modify their own pattern to accommodate a 110 kt downwind twin (i.e., being overtaken, and then a probable extended downwind, anyway, since they would have otherwise been simultaneously turning different bases).
What really killed all those people in Watstonville was not the straight-in approach per se, but the pilots' failure to work with each other in a safe and unambiguous fashion with the skills and mindset to work out something other than a rote 80 kt Cessna trainer pattern and thus allow for a twin doing 30+ kt faster in the pattern.