[netr0ute]

I thought about hashing, but found that hashing would be enormously slow to compute compared to a perfectly crafted tree.

[dafelst]

But did you think about using a perfect hash function and table? Based on my prior research, it seems like they are almost universally faster on small strings than trees and tries due to lower cache miss rates.

[dist1ll]

Ditto. Perfect hashing strings smaller than 8 bytes has been the fastest lookup method in my experience.