[MereInterest]

I've of the opinion that anything that was possible 20 years ago should be imperceptibly fast today, unless there is a fundamental physics limitation (e.g. speed of electric signals limiting real-time applications across large distances). Displaying a GUI, opening a file, listing contents of a directory. When the hardware has improved by several orders of magnitude, there is no excuse for being as slow as it was 20 years ago, let alone slower.