> i'm curious what straightforward storage structure wouldn't be. trying to second-guess ssd firmware seems a tricky design criterion.
> 
Designing for minimal disk stress: Never rewrite data already written to disk. Now we have big and quite cheap main memory. 

I don't critisize the historical design choices. But times have changed.

If I had to design a venti now, I would drop the variable length blocks for 8k blocks (or whatever blocksize a modern fossil would use).
Further, I would store the data directly into disk blocks.. In a parallel log I would store the scores, so that the scores and blocks just can be referenced by the block number. 
At start up, read the score file and construct a memory search tree for a suitably shorted part of the score. (See Mechiel Lukkien's memventi).
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