Chest connections weren't really designed with inserters in mind, they are intended to be used either with logistic chests or with loaders (a vanilla feature that isn't available without mods). With logistic chests, balance mode is actually very powerful, because it allows you to connect a requester chest to another chest in a manner that doesn't suck unlimited resources through the connection until the other chest is full.
If I may ask, what are you trying to build using chest connections with inserters? If you're just worried about performance, don't be. By now, belt connections are optimized enough that you need a megabase to notice the difference in performance.
