> (...) but it all turned out to be a smoke and mirrors show because the hardware is optimized for one particular benchmark they didn't even reference in their comparisons?

I know iOS developers who recently upgraded their MacBooks and they claim they now feel more sluggish. I wouldn't be surprised if it was due to RAM constraints instead of CPU though.

So, take those artificial bencmarks with a grain of salt. They are so optimized that they are optimized out of the real world.