...I am actually trying it with leaving a shoot on the peres, to get more photosynthesis from it, at least for a while.. Also my theory is that it may offer a boost to the scion when you actually start pruning the peres shoots.
I wasnt 100% sure what you meant by this. One thought I'd had before was to have side branches that were decapitated and not allowed to grow at all, just to add more photosynthetic area. I've never seen this done.
What I have seen many times is people not cutting off growing side shoots and, as Inyan also said, I've never seen that go well.
Browsing a blog with lots of astrophytum and ariocarpus porn
[1] I just saw a single pic that points out what I've seen throughout hundreds of other pics. The grafts in this group that retained their leaves ranged from fair to awesome and contained the biggest sexiest scions, the grafts that lost their leaves ranged in size from mediocre to fair, and the grafts in which he neglected to cut off a growing side shoot ended up looking pretty close to pathetic.
If you experiment with decapitated side branches, do post progress photos. But once you graft then your scion should be the only thing allowed to grow, kill everything else with bladed instruments!