[ShroudedNight]

> iterative improvements after a working model if those improvements become necessary.

This doesn't actually work if you've shotgunned the bloat uniformly across your system.

My personal experience was trying to find a 10% performance degradation that turned out to be a worthless branch in memory allocation that ended up being inlined prolifically throughout the codebase. It didn't show up in any profile, and if the group I was with wasn't ruthlessly disciplined in maintaining performance, such that it's effects were felt immediately, I strongly doubt it could have been reversed after the fact without serendipitous re-discovery.