If you'd prefer to "advanced wirehead" over a lifetime of torture, then clearly you're thinking about cost-benefit trade-offs, not some preference for the real-world that overrides everything else.

Whatever your meta-level goals, unless they are "be tortured for the rest of my life," there's simply no way to accomplish them while being tortured indefinitely. That said, suppose you had some neurological condition that caused you to live in constant excrutiating pain, but otherwise in no way incapacitated you - now, you could still accomplish meta-level goals, but you might still prefer the pain-free simulator. I doubt there's anyone who sincerely places zero value on hedons, but no one ever claimed such people existed.