Hundreds? Dude you're like a digital demon then... I've gone through no more than a dozen or so mice on my main PC in my entire life and that's even including the old style ball mice. Only my last three mice have been optical mice, and those were changed out for increased performance, I've never had one fail completely, though I've had 2 that ended up with touchy micro switches.
You need to understand how optical mice work, red, IR, laser, they all work on the same basic operating principal. A light is shined at an object, reflected off of it and fed back into a CCD array which goes to a DSP. The DSP does an edge detection algorithm on the received image and uses a buffer of the last few frames it's captured to determine the distance the mouse has traveled. Lasers are really good at this because the interference pattern generated by the laser in the first place with reflections gives the edge detector algorithm a LOT to work with. If you clean your optics make sure you don't scratch the plastic outer lens, if you do that'll kill them because they'll see the same scratch patterns in every image and it'll override any other edges it might detect. Never clean one with anything but a mild solvent and dry thoroughly with a lint free cloth, or a puff of dry compressed air. I have a Logitech G5 gaming mouse. Worth it's weight in gold, you can adjust the weigh of the mouse which is a novelty but generally useless. It has 7 buttons, 9 if you could the wheel's left and right pushing but I've never found a reliable use for those. Adjustable resolution (which is the gaming feature really) And it was inexpensive. I have not once ever had to touch the lens on it, it's in a slightly recessed hole on the mouse so it's generally well protected, if it ever got clogged with anything a quick burst of canned air is all I need.
There are high performance optical mouse pads out there, and they're not a joke, they're designed with with a regular optical or micro optical pattern on them which is unique over the entire area that a mouse looks at and tiles perfectly with itself. Even with custom printed graphics on top on the mouses scale the pattern across the surface is unique, even at it's visual looking hard edges.
I've used Wowpad's since I found them, they're thin flexible mousepads, I currently have a 1ft square one, but they make 6inch square ones as well. Never a glitch, always precise. The backing is made of that 'lint roller' type material which is slightly adhesive till it collects dust then you wash it and it regains it's stickiness, juuuuust enough to keep it from sliding. I get them at local office supply stores, you can get them from microthin.com
My last 6 inch pad lasted almost 2 years, this 12 inch pad is a year and a half old and holding up better. I think you can get them with custom graphics too from the website.