There are two different things here - the first is people not needing an elaborate solution because computers are fast and the second is that if someone does ne

There are two different things here - the first is people not needing an elaborate solution because computers are fast and the second is that if someone does need a solution with less overhead, why is that difficult? Values over time like audio is a one dimensional signal. Seeking is basic data structure stuff, filtering is basic signal stuff. There aren't going to be other dimensions like time, which makes the other values just other channels. If you need to combine dense values they can be not only filtered, but filtered into individual distributions. People give abstract descriptions like you have here, but I'm just not seeing a difficult problem in all of this.