Sonnet 5.5 is within a percentage point or two of Opus 5.5 on Terminal Bench.
When I looked at a benchmark, it suggested Sonnet 5.5 wasn't much cheaper than Opus 5.5 at Low to Medium effort for similar performance. That might not be representative of real world use though.
Optimizing performance is one of the tasks best suited to AI, since the outcome is measurable.
I can't comment on complex algorithms specifically, but it's not at all the case that this works only for basic apps or cannot handle complex, performance critical work.