Cylo, it was really your first comment that really summed up everything that came after!
Quote: "I bet this has already been told."
You were correct. Your grievances have been told countless times before, and are discussed on pretty much a daily basis around here!
GG itself just really isn't optimized enough yet to deliver blockbuster results. (I believe a lot of it involves the shaders used, but I'm no expert in such things so take that with a half grain of salt). The sliders alone are not going to "optimize" any game, although some will affect performance. Try turning off bloom, that seems to have the greatest impact currently. I had never tried "Gem World" before. Thanks for pointing it out! I was getting between 30-40 fps on my laptop, all on highest settings except terrain (the defaults). Anyway, there is a lot of good advice around here on truly optimizing the assets you use in your game as well as level design. Sorry I can't point you to any specific threads as I haven't been saving them as I've gone along. Even the regular TGC forums are chalk full of valuable info!
Desktop: i7 4770@3.4Ghz, 12GB RAM, Win 10/64, GeForce GTX 1080, 1TB SSD, 1TB HDD; Laptop: i7 4800MQ@2.7Ghz, 16GB RAM, Win 10/64, GeForce GTX870M , 1TB SSD.