It's not an optimization though. It's an exploit to gain advantage with no positive benefit to the network. It's not like designing a more power efficient chip or getting cheaper power because those things retain the way they mine blocks. This is using an exploit in the code secretly to gain monetary advantage and then blocking advancements to the code that would end this exploit but provide needed scaling improvement to everyone's benefit.  I think the price is rising because we are seeing that BU is seen as very likely to have diminished and dwindling support which makes a hard fork less likely.