William Morder composed on 2018-03-23 21:04 (UTC-0700):
My question is whether the package manager will put them there if I create a separate partition for /opt. In any case, little tweaks have got them running better.
Config "tweaks" belong either in /etc/ or in ~. /opt/ shouldn't be touched manually any more than /usr/lib/ or /usr/bin/.
Whether or not /opt/ is a separate filesystem the package manager has no knowledge of, unless it's reading /etc/fstab, which I very seriously doubt.