Hi Stoogeguy,
It’s always amazing to me how little most mattress salespeople know about mattress materials and components and what is even more amazing is how it doesn’t even occur to most of them that the quality of the materials in the mattress might even be important. If you ask them if they would buy a piece of furniture that had real wood prices without knowing if it contained particle board, MDF, or real wood it would make sense to most of them that nobody would willingly buy particle board at real wood prices and yet that’s what they are selling almost every day. Their sales and marketing “story” is mostly about form and function rather than quality and just like with furniture … cheap materials can have the same form and function as more expensive materials … they just don’t last as long.
I personally wouldn’t consider either the Optimum line or the iComfort line and would tend to avoid major manufacturers completely (see the first guideline here). That’s not necessarily because every mattress they make is poor quality (although many are) but because they don’t usually provide meaningful information about the materials inside and if you are able to find out with some “painful” and frustrating research then in almost all cases the value turns out to be poor compared to most smaller independent or local manufacturers. Lower quality materials belong in lower priced mattresses … not in more premium priced models. In the case of the Optimum … none of the many retailers I’ve talked with know or could find out the density of the Optisense memory foam in the mattresses (although overstock lists it as 4 lbs).
You are actually quite fortunate because there are some good options available in the general San Francisco Bay area where you should be able to get better and more meaningful answers to your questions. They are listed in post #2 here.
Phoenix