If you don't want to carry cocked-and-locked or worry about striker discharges (I wonder about those who really are worried about the latter), there are hammer-fired DAO options as well as strike-fired ones. I might avoid the Beretta Tomcat (I had a non-Inox that had a frame crack after only a couple of hundred rounds), but there is the Beretta Pico for current production hammer-fired .380 fans, the Colt Pony (no longer in production but still found if you look), and a number of mini nines as well.
As for hammer on an empty chamber in a wheel gun, all you've lost is the last round, not the first; hammer goes back, loaded chamber advances into battery.