Love this analogy!
"Gamers" in particular are often liable to buy gobs of RAM and then spend hours trying to use as little of it as possible. It's like buying a King size bed and then making deliberate efforts to never use more than the area of a twin, just so you can look at the bare parts of it and go "Look how much free bed I have, my sleeping experience is truly optimized!"
Unless something has a memory leak and is grabbing it all up or your working with an old computer where you need your base memory to be larger than a certain value, optimization of memory is pretty much useless these days just like BC stated.
Only memory optimization I can think of that makes sense would be a programmer or developer where a group of programmers are trying to make something run faster, so that on each computer its distributed to will run it as efficient as possible.
Also years ago memory optimization had a better payoff for the effort spent in doing it. These days computers are so fast that the gain is pretty much only seen in a benchmark result, but that to the end user it seems to perform the same.
Additionally if you have lots of paging going on where hard drive is being used as virtual memory because you only have say 4GB RAM and the system would run far better on 8GB or more, then it makes more sense to just go with a RAM upgrade for more memory if your system can take on additional memory. If your system is one that is maxed out on memory supported and your trying to reduce the memory use, then its pretty much time to buy a newer computer which can go beyond the 4GB memory mark and run better. Also a performance gain could be had this way as well in possibly a better CPU and GPU and maybe SSD instead of HDD.
*Btw used the 4GB memory example because I have recent seen some people with computers from around 2009 that can only handle 4GB RAM and all the RAM gets used up with Windows 10 and they have lots of paging going on. They bought new computers with 8GB RAM and problems solved.
