FYI, you'll be in for a lot of heartache should you ever need that optical drive. On machines that ship with an optical drive, Apple provides a firmware that refuses to boot off USB or firewire optical drives. It'll start, but then it'll fail pretty quickly. The only solution is to crack open your machine and slip your SuperDrive back in. Oh, they also block booting from USB flash or disk drives. So, don't try that as a workaround either.
No, I can't. For the moment, I need that optical drive rather badly. In the future, I won't even have the option, as Apple is highly likely to eliminate it entirely in the next few iterations.
K then since you can't give up a hard drive or optical drive, just get ready to lug around a desktop for the rest of your life because apparently whatever profession you're in is years behind everyone else.
For 99% of users, an SSD and some sort of data drive is a perfectly workable solution. You're the outlier here.
Development and operation of internet-based services is "years behind everyone else"? What is it you think "everyone else" is doing? And how will anyone manage to have an SSD and data drive in their laptop when there's no physical room for it?
Not needing 9TB and an optical drive to do it? Really, you have specific needs. That's fine. But it's fairly egotistical to think that a consumer company like Apple will make something to meet your simple needs.
What I said stands. What you apparently lack is the ability to put it together.
There certainly is room for it. SSDs are just rather small circuit boards with a bunch of memory chips on them. So any laptop big enough to hold a 2.5" hard drive can also hold that hard drive plus an SSD, rather easily.
