Jeff,
You get all that google search traffic using the same techniques you are decrying in this post! It's just that Justin (the author of Hybrid) did it for you instead of you doing it consciously.

For instance,
1. Your doctitle sums up what this post is about with the post title. (could be optimized)
2. The H1 tag is wrapped around this post's title, not around the site title.
3. Your content comes before your sidebar in the document flow.
4. Your markup structure is logical and semantic. (doc size could be optimized)
5. You use breadcrumbs.

You take these things for granted because they were done for you by a developer who paid attention to what he was doing. Not all themes are built this way. In fact, most aren't.

Do you enjoy all that google traffic? Further optimizing your theme would likely result in even more of it. Search engine traffic is extremely valuable, mainly because it's free, and mostly new traffic. If you sold something on this site, a 5-10% increase in SE traffic WOULD matter to you, I guarantee that.

And BTW, no one is saying that you have to abandon writing for humans. I'm specifically talking about optimizing themes for search engines. This takes little to no ongoing effort.