What Does It Take To Surpass A SME V?

Since you will have 2 really nice cartridges, an S tonearm with removable head-shells would be convenient. With SOTA, you have to be very careful that an arm will fit within the arm board, won't bump into the dust cover, and won't be over-weight for proper balancing of the suspension. My Fidelity Research FR64fx (S with removeable head shells) weighs ~ 2.2 lbs, and comes in just under that weight limit. It's a very nice match with SOTA Nova :) 

Of course when swapping head shells, VTA adjustment is a concern and most arms with on-the-fly VTA will be a difficult fit for SOTA. But in practice, the only cartridge I've yet encountered with a wildly different height than others is Van den Hul Colibri (much taller).

My experiences about and from other audiophiles tells me that's almost imposibel to the stylus tip " been removed " from the cantilever with out any damage to the cantilever.

In my own experience, this is quite common for MC carts with boron cantilevers. It's happened to a local friend, with his Ortofon Jubilee MC getting snagged on a fuzzy sweater sleeve. It's happened to my Koetsu Onyx, when a girlfriend sent it jetting hard down and across the record surface. In both cases, the boron cantilever and suspension appeared completely undamaged; the stylus had simply released its bond. 

If it was an aluminum pipe cantilever, it's more likely that would have crumpled first. But boron rod is strong and stiff. Also, most modern MC cartridges have very robust suspensions & dampers. By comparison Ortofon 2M with its tiny little rubber ring suspension will give way long before a stylus is yanked out. 

With boron MC's, apparently the stylus glue bond is often the weak point. 

The clever thing about ET’s counterweights is that using a lighter counterweight should decrease the horizontal moving mass (non-rotational) while increasing the vertical moving mass (moment of inertial). That should nudge the 2 movement dimensions closer towards parity, though I’m not sure by how much. And too long a lever arm (facilitating the lighter weights), will eventually become unwieldy.

I still have an ET2 in the closet, with a broken headshell lead. It’s been many years since I ran it, and it was NOT a good arm for an analog neophyte back then. But I still remember how clean and pure the sound quality was, with Ortofon Kontrapunkt "a" and MC20 cartridges. I’d like to get that up and running again at some point.

Not sure about arm pod idea - perhaps there are some reasonable use cases. But for use with a suspended table (like op’s SOTA) does NOT seem like one of them!

One new tonearm that looks VERY interesting, and is actually quite reasonably priced (2,200 Euros preorder), is the Korf TA-SF9R. It has removable headshells and should easily fit a SOTA. If you peruse the Korf blog, the designer has made absolutely HEROIC efforts at a scientific-based approach to tonearm design while maintaining the perspective of a true audiophile and analog lover. I definitely don't need another arm, but have half a mind to try one myself.

The original question is what does it take to surpass a SME V? My turntable is a SOTA Cosmos Eclipse. So it's a floating subchassis. I have no need to discuss tonearm and bearing mounting structure because my choice is defined by the 1 inch thick aluminum subchassis. 

Sorry OP 😥

Yes, lately analog threads on audiogon have the tendency of running off the rails, far away from OP's original inquiry.

The good news is your Cosmos table is fantastic, as is your SME V arm (which I'd love to try someday). You're in the happy position of trying to improve on existing greatness. The Cosmos's rigid sub-chassis is a key part of that design, which was my objection to the arm pod suggestion (not to mention having to manage P2S distance and dustcover clearance, etc). The SOTA's are simply designed to work well with gimbal arms of around 9" - 9.5", on their integrated arm boards. And the SME V is kind of a "classic" for that form factor. Besides the FR64fx, I've had a Technics EPA-500 on my SOTA Nova; it was also quite nice and kinda wish I'd bought it. 

Is the Verismo a good match for a current injection phono? Ortofon specifically chose a less-ferrous armature for the Verismo (and A95, and Windfeld Ti), which reduces its output for a given coil (0.2mV from 7 ohms - compare to A90 at 0.27mV from 4 ohms). It has a relatively high coil DC resistance for its output. I'm not too educated on the current-injection approach but it seems like it favors a high ratio of output signal to coil resistance, which necessitates highly magnetic armatures.