No, it's not satire. The difficulty of finding the optimal solution says nothing about what it takes to come within 99.999% of optimal with 99.999% probability.

So I'm not talking about the number of steps needed to prove optimality with a correct P algorithm versus an exponential one.

I'm only talking about how this applies to the efficient market hypothesis.

In case P /= NP the gap doesn't necessarily have to be exponential, just superpolynomial (e.g. n^loglogn).