I really wish there had been a bigger push towards some kind of standardized packet writing for DVDRW (CDRW had this issue with a one use calibration track), so that they could behave more like floppies (drag and drop file transfers etc).

The media itself is fully passive, while a SD card or thumbdrive have logic sitting between the USB interface and the raw flash. Thus optical media can be "rescued" by simply getting a new drive.

And you really need to mistreat a optical disc to make it completely unreadable.

Or perhaps someone could buy the minidisc tech off Sony and resurrect magnet-optical storage?