I suspect you are right if we are talking about epistemic rationality, but not instrumental rationality.

In practice, when attempting to maximize a value, once you know what sort of system you are in, most of your energy has to go into gaming the system: finding the cost of minimizing the costs and looking for exploits. This is more true the more times a game is iterated: if a game literally went on forever, any finite cost becomes justifiable for this sort of gaming of the system: you can spend any bounded amount of bits. (Conversely, if a game is unique, you are less justified in spending your bits on finding solutions: your budget roughly becomes what you can afford to spare.)

If we apply LW techniques of rationalism (as you've defined it) what we get is general methods, heuristics, and proofs on ways to find these exploits, a summation of this method being something like "know the rules of the world you are in" because your knowledge of a game directly affects your ability to manipulate its rules and scoring.

In other words, I suspect you are right if what we are talking about is simply finding the best situation for your algorithm: choosing the best restaurant in the available solution space. But when we are in a situation where the rules can be manipulated, used, or applied more effectively I believe this dissolves. You could probably convince me pretty quickly with a more formal argument, however.