(a) Verification can be faster. The current daemon is not using the most optimized code from my/wolf's efforts. That should be fixed -- particularly on machines with AES, it'll help.
Only a little, and last I checked that code was not particularly portable or well documented. I also tested it on a few platforms and saw little improvement (over the current daemon hash code -- clearly it is much better than what was there before). I'm sure it does help in some cases, but the code in the daemon needs to be a bit different than what you get trying to squeeze a few cycles out of a miner. Although ultimately the optimization should go in.
60 seconds is a decent amount of time for wide-area network communication. It requires a lot more care and feeding than Bitcoin's 10 minute block time, but I'd be quite surprised if some tuning could not get the orphan rate below 5%.
60 seconds is a decent amount of time. The problem is that you don't have 60 seconds. To get below 5% (not really a good target) you need processing latency and dissemination within 5% of 60 seconds, which is only 3 seconds. That's actually very hard to do, and likely impossible with current technology for a self-organizating ad-hoc p2p network.
The reason Satoshi picked 10 minutes wasn't that it would take 10 minutes to disseminate blocks, it was so that collisions would happen infrequently. 1-2% assumes a 6-12 second dissemination time.
It it somewhat hard to tell but it seems like duck has a very low orphan rate, at most a few percent, maybe less. There may be other factors, but the 4 minute block time definitely helps. (Sampling error is significant here since there just aren't that many blocks total.)
I agree with what you said about the pool software, and other software sources of latency. But at the same time, it is easy to say "just fix the code" but actually deploying new or modified code requires careful design, implementation, and testing. It may be that simply increasing the block time is a more expedient low-risk if partial fix, despite the need for a hard fork. Of course the two are not mutually exclusive either.
And, as others have noted, orphans aren't really that big a problem... they don't affect the difficulty, so it's not like you "lost" money on the orphan.
They are still a big problem system-wide, they just aren't a big problem for individual miners.