Sans, yup, it looks like the lawyers made good money processing patents for fairing anti-drive units when the production solution is to mount the fairing to a stationary shaft. Sounds more robust to me.
As for Defiant, the public artwork shows the rotor to be a little higher from the cabin, proportionately, than on RAIDER, but the twin engine installation might also affect that. In any case, I see no evidence that the transmission needs to be completely on top of the cabin structure and it does not appear that is the layout. Looks like the passenger cabin is forward of the transmission bay. Also helpful is that larger helicopters typically have a higher cruise speed than their smaller relatives for a given aircraft layout. I have no doubt that Defiant will be fast and a significantly lower L/De than a conventional helo.
When it comes to balancing CG, few rotors in the world will have the moment generation cabailities of the Defiant main rotor ;-) If they want to fly level body I'm sure they can.