It's actually a bit ironic, because I consider Ferrari to build elegant cars while my old V8 Dodge is a triumph of brute force and ignorance. They're both great cars at opposite ends of the spectrum :-)
A variation on the sentiment I heard in a movie: "turbochargers are for wussies, real cars have cubic inches!"
The problem in the previous solution was that it took a while to keep the fancy datastructures updated. (It's a globally replicated distributed system..)
For example, Enzo Ferrari once said that the secret to better performance is more horsepower.