Justin,
SAP HANA supports to keep track of committed row changes.
This is a form of technical history and in your case with save a changed row when SLT committed it to SAP HANA and not when the record (note: record and row are semantically two different things!) had become valid from the business point of view.
Therefore, the history table feature does not cover your requirement here.
To enable time dependent master data, you still need to model this directly into your table design. Just like SAP BW on HANA still does it.
This is also further supported by features like the time dependent join in Analytic Views. There you select a column indicating record validity in the fact table and the valid-from and valid-to columns in the master data table to specify the join condition.
I know that at first sight the history table feature looks very appealing, but as mentioned in the blog discussion you referred it's not all that easy ...
- Lars