This is the philosophy that has led to our software becoming slower despite improvements in hardware.

Performance is always important. Especially for consumer applications, where your software will probably need to run alongside many other processes each competing for resources.

i used to think this was true, but theres a lot of stuff recently where there really aren't such hotspots everywhere. when i profile UI stuff for instance there isn't some big obvious hotspot to optimize, the runtime is spread all throughout the app doing random things. if all the regular code you write is just ludicrously slow, you're going to end up with something that's just laggy and without any way to fix it other than rewriting it