I feel comfortable equating problem solving with optimization, for while we are still living outside of a utopia, any beneficial system that less than perfectly efficient is causing suffering (from an opportunity cost perspective).

Similarly, I feel comfortable treating a drive towards improvement the same I do a drive towards perfection, since without an end goal (perfection), you can't have improvement, since you cannot say if what you're doing is bringing you closer or farther from 'good'.

I do agree with you though that an individual can focus on hyper optimizing their personal life to the point where it is not good from a societal perspective; however, that's is not what I gathered the article was arguing ("Enough of our mania to be the best and the most, he says. It’s time to content ourselves with being average.")

You're right that you need some measure to judge improvement, but you can have a vision of perfection without making it a goal in itself.

Optimiziation may be a subset of problem solving, but surely you'd agree that a problem can be solved even without the situation being brought to optimality?

Optimization is not just about reaching optimal state - which for all practical problems is impossible, given both the constraints of physical reality and the fuzzy definition of optimum humans can conceptualize. Optimization is a process of determining what the optimum is and moving the system towards that point.

If perfection is not a goal, how is it useful? And why call it perfection? I'd argue that you can have models without making them goals, but a model is not perfection unless it is also your primary goal. Perfection implies an optimal moral evaluation, and moral evaluation is always relative to a goal.