there are programs out there such as CFOUR and Molpro that can have a 'hard' time running in parallel for certain applications which does significantly increase the computational expense. Sure, there are problems that are quite difficult to parallelize. It may be that PoN's model is one of those. I...

No, there's no SQL. Every thing is in text files. Go to where the game is installed and look in the VGN folder. All the files except the graphics are in plain text and editable by a text editor. To comment on the OP, it appears that the answer is poorly optimized, nonconcurrent code. PoN is built on...