I don't know if there is any real optimization you can do for solid-state devices, or if those optimizations will even make for a significant speed advantage.

Did you ever study data structures? Have you compared the speed of doing a linear search with a binary tree search? There are optimisations you can do for solid-state devices, it's just like RAM. That's why people spend time trying to work out what the best data structure is. Otherwise, we'd just dump everything in a list and grep for the results we want. As for hardware-specific optimisations, once there is enough hardware around, if people find that it is going too slow, somebody will find a way to do it faster.