It does have the potentially useful feature that the reference ripple goes away when you're exactly in phase. Might be sort of nice to do the
+- pulse thing with some minimum width value for both pulses, and use a fast RC lowpass plus an analog switch to get rid of the up-down bumps when you're near lock. Maybe use the lock detector to control the switch--keep it closed when you're out of lock, and open it briefly to get rid of the barump-bump when you're in lock.The problem is always how much extra phase shift you can tolerate inside the loop, and the VCO already contributes 90 degrees, which doesn't help.
A few nasty metastability issues, though--same as using D-flops for mixers in offset loops. I learned my lesson about that in 1982, when I was an astronomer masquerading as an EE.
Cheers
Phil Hobbs