I'd agree with views and indexed views as an option to restructure underlying data.

I'd also note that on the "buy truly excessive hardware" side, there are commodity 4U servers that can be bought with 1TB of RAM, Fusionio ioDrive PCIe SSD's, and well over 1TB of SATA/SAS SSD's as well (at that level, you'd be looking at controller bottlenecks).

If nothing else, sticker shock from some of that hardware may... encourage... management to allow more redesign of the database and/or the software itself.