Optimizing procedural meshes

Hey all, whats is the deal with triangle strips these days, does it not matter anymore? It has been removed from the manual and apparently its obsolete:

 [Obsolete("Use SetTriangles instead. Internally this function will convert the triangle strip to a list of triangles anyway.")]
 public void SetTriangleStrip(int[] triangles, int submesh);

 [Obsolete("Use GetTriangles instead. Internally this function converts a list of triangles to a strip, so it might be slow, it might be a mess.")]
 public int[] GetTriangleStrip(int submesh);

I am cutting up some meshes into smaller ones with code and I am throwing together arbitrary arrays of vertices and triangles, are there things I can do besides calling optimize? Optimize takes .1 ms to run on 4500 tris, does it do anything meaningful? Or are my meshes simply optimal :)

Thanks!