I like optical media for the same reasons you indicate. Write once and have reasonable expectation it will last for a good long time. I do wish Optical media wasn't so stagnated as well. Write speeds could be improved by adding more laser heads to work in parallel on the disks, no reason for us to be stuck with a single head like vinyl had to for obvious reasons. That could increase disk R/W quite a bit and make it comparable to USB 2/3 but write once.

I'd love to get a holographic disk or heck an isolinear chip-shaped slab to write to because I like Star Trek.