1. Most of the recommendations are things that will have little to no benefit on any modern SSD because all of this is handled for you in the firmware. When SSD firmware is not perfectly optimizing your performance, it is doing so to extend the life of the drive. Take this with a grain of salt though since many SSD manufacturers use really bad code provided by the controller manufacturer (SandForce notably provided awful stock firmware).
2. SSD benchmarks commentary is mostly accurate - since performance is very motherboard chipset-dependent, we chose the best ones to publish. Can't really blame anyone, but it means that if you bought the drive you are incredibly unlikely to achieve identical performance.
3. "Benchmarks are hard". No, not really. I wrote most of the benchmarks we used for linux testing. The reason benchmarks could be considered difficult is because all of the internal benchmarks that are used were written in-house and not released to the public. Reviewers never really had the right tools.
4. Enterprise SSDs and Consumer SSDs are drastically different. If you want consistent high performance, get an enterprise PCI-X drive. NAND quality is the major difference... and good NAND is hard to find. Generally an enterprise SSD will also have a significantly faster controller, and on larger drives, will contain more than one controller to avoid straining resources.