> disastrous random access latency of optical media

In my experience, it wasn't that much of a problem, since unlike HDDs the latency was very predictable (subject to CD drive speed), so programs were written just fine to handle it.

(It probably also helped that the average CD drive speed was faster than the worst-case drive that the program designed for)

I still think developers should be forbidden from having SSDs so they stop writing such terrible programs.