We have an embarrassment of riches in terms of compute power yet all software is still incredibly slow because we and up slowing down everything by a "negligible" amount here and another "negligible" amount there and so on.

> In almost all cases you cannot just walk up to a production Linux system and do meaningful performance analysis without serious work

So? That's one very very very specific use case that others should not have to pay for. Not even with a relatively small 1% perf hit.