.....thats how a lot of people kill the optimas is charging them to fast with too many amps....let them charge at low amps for a longer period of time and they work well 
That's where there are a lot of discrepancies. You can ask one manufacturer of a gel battery how to charge them and they say fast and hard, ask another and they say trickle. I have a yellow top optima that's probably going on 7 years old, haven't charged it at all in a year and it's still holding pretty well.
As for them not being packed with enough lead to have more memory, my yellow top is the heaviest starting battery I've ever toted, and I handle a shitpile of batteries every summer. Wet cells seem to be more likely to come back from a low charge much better with a trickle charge, while the gels have a better chance of coming back if you charge them high to get them up fast, then switch over to trickle.
