Indeed, you certainly can't get a longer smallest stick by small perturbations of that answer, because one of the 5-sticks is entirely made up of smallest-fragments and so if you lengthen them all by any ε > 0 then that stick overflows. What I was hoping to show was that the converse is also true – that the only way in which a dissection can be locally optimal is if some stick is made up entirely of smallest-fragments, by showing that in all other cases you can find a system of ε-adjustments that lengthens every smallest-fragment. No luck yet, though!

(In fact, writinghawk has proved over on LJ that my dissection for 5-into-7 is globally as well as locally optimal, which is more than I had previously known.)

I've written a thing that looks for integer solutions

Ooh, I'd like to see whatever data it's generated.

Also it can't handle irrationals and so far can do fractions only where all stick-fragments share a denominator

In any rational dissection there must be some denominator shared by all fragments (just take the lcm of all denominators), so the latter isn't a problem. And I'm still convinced that irrationals can't appear in any solution unless there's an equally good or better one without them (I have a half-thought-out proof idea involving treating R as a vector space over Q), so I'm not worried about the former either.

So far it is tediously slow and hasn't got anything harder than 5,7...

Apparently I'm not exactly doing this the optimal way... because 7 x 10 in 1/3 steps is, er, ENOMEMORY. Fantastic.

5 x 8 sticks in half integer steps is best with 4 sticks cut into 2/3 and 4 uncut assembled into 4 lots of 3/5 and 1 of 2/2/2/2 which gives more than 3 stick-parts.

With m and n <= 10 and m<n in half integer steps 12 combinations have a smallest-stick-fragment larger than gcd(m,n); 4 of which are non-integer (5 x7 is the smallest). I have no idea how to prove whether any given answer could be bested by taking smaller steps other than by trying progressively smaller steps and seeing.

5 x 8 sticks in half integer steps is best with 4 sticks cut into 2/3 and 4 uncut assembled into 4 lots of 3/5 and 1 of 2/2/2/2 which gives more than 3 stick-parts.

Borrowing writinghawk's proof technique: in a better solution, each of the five 8-sticks would have to be cut into at most three pieces (if you cut one in four then a piece must be <=2), which gives 15 pieces overall, and so at least one of the eight 5-sticks must end up as a single piece (15 isn't enough pieces for two each). The 8-stick including that whole 5-stick then has 3 units of length left over; if you divide that in two then you have a piece <=1.5 (no good) and OTOH if you leave it whole then that leaves 2 units on the 5-stick you cut it off.

So this dissection for 5 into 8 cannot be beaten even if you were to increase the denominator, and hence gerald_duck's question is indeed answered.

(I do wonder how far that proof technique can be automated. It might give rise to a better search algorithm!)