But people use numpy for matrix multiplies in Python. Unless they are claiming to be 35k times faster on general-purpose code, the 35k number is absurd.
A lot of ugly,unreadable code has come into existence because of the need to twist it into NumPy calls. If you can replace these with good old for loops and achieve similar performance, then you've already won. Besides that, there are a lot of code that involves looping that isn't matrix multiplication or covered by NumPy.