Models are there to enable us to reason about things that are too complex to reason about directly. They're always going to lose information. Sometimes using a different model is the right answer, and sometimes you need practical experiments to determine what actually works.

For example for very small sets of numbers you could basically pre-sort every combination there is then have a very large lookup table. Much like a rainbow table for passwords. Your O is basically a binary search lookup O(log(n)) or even better O(1) if you can make it linear. However, the upfront cost is huge and storage cost is huge, lookup would probably be big too. Hmm, now that I think about it this could be an interesting thing to mess with. Also at this time anything past 4 bytes would be unusable. Hmm, maybe later. Like you point out a 'galactic alg'. Portions of that thinking can be pulled out and used for other items though.

With sorting using the comparison is a good proxy for if it might perform well. But it is just that, a proxy. Like the weird sort I just made up. There is probably a few shifts and muls in there. Those are decently expensive and can blow your perf right out of the water.