[gfiorav]

Good points. For the record: I'm not saying all veterans are egotistical.

I think code based performance is something that is just not as big as an issue as before. In web world it's common to solve extreme performance via cache, replication, etc.

In any case, I think that in very few cases you get to a performance requirement so intense that you can't write maintainable code. We can't argue on extremes :)