I have 2x 12" rMBs. From my experience, the heat transfer bottleneck is not die to heatsink (which is where the thermal paste is). The bottleneck is aluminum case to ambient air. In other words, if you care about avoiding the hot/cool cycles: (1) it's probably better to just use the laptop where there is good ambient airflow, or (2) this isn't the best laptop for you.
Basically, from what I can tell, the CPU die to heatsink/bracket transfer is fine and the heatsink/bracket to case transfer is fine. You can tell because under load, the case gets hot a hell - sometimes too hot to even have on your lap. The issue is other than slow dissipation into ambient air, the case stays hot.
I don't feel like searching, but someone else in this forums did a bunch of benchmarking and temperature tests a while back. One of the tests showed that the Macbook performed materially better and stayed significantly cooler on a granite kitchen counter as compared to on a wooden desk. This is because granite is a good heat conductor and is good at drawing the heat away from the aluminum case, whereas wood is the opposite and acts more as a thermal insulator than a heat conductor.
So that's our thermal bottleneck: Cooling the aluminum case. It's certainly not pretty, but I bet something like
this pointed back at the body would do a lot more than replacing thermal pads.