A person should not become so caught up in optimization that they never get anything done because they are continuously caught up in squeezing out yet another 1% performance improvement. But to say that optimization should not even be considered is very questionable. It should not hold a person back but it also should never be completely gone from a person thinking when they are building something.

To say that a person should not optimize is to say that a person should not use VBO's or whatever the DirectX equivalent is. This is also like saying that a person should use an uncompressed format like .bmp. Also it is like saying that a person should not consider sending indices to the GPU. It is also like saying that a person should not work on keeping their model's poly count low. "Who cares about optimization?... let's build dozen's of models with 10,000,000 triangles each into our game!"

If a person ignores these things then their project space will be the size of a blu-ray disk for just one level and the game will likely run at only one or two frames per second on even the fastest machines.

Paying attention to optimization is fundamental. It is like anything else. If you do not consider it and learn it, and put it into practice then you will never understand it or be able to implement it. You cannot get good at something by ignoring it.

Having to re-build the entire infrastructure of a software package after it's been built up for years to accommodate future optimization that was never considered before is a real possibility if this fundamental idea is neglected.

To be honest, I don't care what other people do in this regard. If I some day install some bloated, inefficient software that doesn't run on my machine, I'm just going to erase it and I won't think twice about it. When people ask me about the software I'll tell them it sucks and it wasn't written properly, you have to buy a $4000.00 dollar machine to run it.

Unless that software is a killer-app, very few people will respond differently.

I don't view people around here as my competition, I like to communicate with like minded people and I also like to help people, I don't view this any differently then when I wash dishes or clean tables at the local homeless soup kitchen. I'm not going to argue with anyone about this, there would be no point. Nobody is bound by law to pay attention to optimization but it is a guaranteed fact that you will be making everyone else who does pay attention to optimization look a whole lot better in contrast to you.

It's your name that's going on the product, it yours to do with as you please. How do you want people to view your name?

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P.S. Try this experiment, make up a super amazing resume that no game company could possibly ignore but start it off with the following.

"THE NUMBER ONE RULE OF OPTIMIZATION IS: DON"T OPTIMIZE"

Now send it off to a bunch of companies and see if it receives any replies.

To say that a person should not optimize is to say that a person should not use VBO's or whatever the DirectX equivalent is. This is also like saying that a person should use an uncompressed format like .bmp. Also it is like saying that a person should not consider sending indices to the GPU. It is also like saying that a person should not work on keeping their model's poly count low. "Who cares about optimization?... let's build dozen's of models with 10,000,000 triangles each into our game!"

To me, optimization involves writing significant extra code/doing extra work/going out of the way to make something work more quickly. Your examples don't really fit into that - they're really just alternate ways of doing things, perhaps mildly more complex than other options. Of course when choosing between several options that are roughly equivalent in terms of implementation cost, you should choose the solution that best meets your needs.