For God's Sake, How Do I Reduce The Endless Lag???

Question

I'm aware that the Classic uses disk medium and not, yknow, flash storage. Prior to my 120GB Classic, I used a 40GB 3rd Gen from 2003 'til now.
For a long time I suffered with a Powerbook with a smaller hard drive than my 120GB iPod, so I was forced to keep all my music on the iPod. I accepted the lag then.
But now I have a Mac capable of anything, and am ready to start removing music off my iPod. But in my googling, it seems like a lot of people say that removing things off your iPod and cutting down on space usage hasn't helped the lag for them at all.
It has 103GB full, music only, no video, and unless I fix the lag, it will probably be the death of me, because trying to change songs in a car is an aggravating and near-suicidal endeavor, because of how rarely the scrollwheel deems to respond, or clicking too many menus ahead because I've waited a while and come to the assumption that my previous click didn't register.
I'm willing to cut back large amounts of gigs, I just want to know if it will noticeably help.

Answer 1

Ignore the self-righteous replies ... now how about some help?
Is your Classic's firmware up to date? There have been some improvements to responsiveness compared to initial releases.
Is your Classic's click wheel covered by a skin? I had to surgically remove the thin silicone skin over the wheel and got much better response.
Do you use a lot of smart playlists, especially ones that depend on the contents of other playlists? That can bog things down, especially if you have a lot (say, 75 or more). I did get some improvement with the last firmware release, but the key seems to be to limit your use of multi-cascaded playlists.