Thanks for those tips! Just to contribute back a factoid in case you weren't aware, I noticed that the manpage for emacsclient says this:

"If the value of [the alternate editor] is the empty string, run `emacs --daemon' to start Emacs in daemon mode, and try to connect to it."

So your aliases would continue to work if you replace -a=emacs with -a=''. And you'd only pay the startup cost the first time you run ec or e.