Typical hardness of tree decomposition?
I just came across a relevant paper -- Kloks/Boedlander's "Only few graphs have bounded tree width". They show that almost all graphs with $n$ vertices and $\delta n$ edges have treewidth on the order of $n^\epsilon$, $\epsilon=\frac{\delta-1}{\delta+1}$. For instance $\delta=3$ means typical tree-width grows as $\sqrt{n}$

So even if greedy method found the best decomposition for all graphs, the resulting algorithm would still be intractably slow for typical graphs