The second one is not stupid actually, it can speed up the computer if the fragmentation is excessive. For the gamers among us, it also can make a big difference if the game files (some of which can be as large as 4gb) are fragmented causing excessive seeking by the HD during game play. It is true though that today's hard disks are so much faster than the ones that existed when defraggers came into vogue that defragmentation now has far less impact on overall system performance than it did back then.
Having said that, defragging the recovery partition will have no effect at all on performance since it's very rarely, if ever, accessed.
Yeah exactly, i have a separate partition on my second HDD just for my games and that is the one that i really want\need to keep well defragged and optimized, as you said it really helps during gameplay.