[rootlocus]

This is exactly how I feel about performance. Unrelated to any programming language, including my own optimizations. The higher the speedup the more we cheer, however most optimizations aren't clever techniques. They're just someone using a profiler to find "huh, radiator fluid shouldn't go in the fuel tank".

Most performance bottlenecks aren't inherent limitations of the hardware or the problem. There's some minimum amount of effort required to get the result, but that's never the reason why the application doesn't perform well. It's always the cruft we add on top.