The issue here is not brute-force vs optimized. It is over engineering. Why spend 10 minutes optimizing your program when you can spend two weeks over engineering it.
Had I been in your shoes, I'd accept that there things I am not privy to, and therefore I can't have the full picture and thus I can't exercise judgement. Instead I'd try to understand what the other person is telling me - especially on HN - instead of jumping to conclusions.
A complete and efficient solution would take 2+ years plus a very senior, very specialized engineering team chasing a moonshot.
A brute-force approach that can leverage compute is far more efficient in engineering time, operational costs (eng time vs compute), and opportunity cost.
This isn't something that can be optimized in 10 minutes, and insinuating that while digging further suggests that haven't dealt with truly complex engineering problems.
