> Raw performance is efficiency.

Efficiency is analogous to velocity, with gains analogous to distance. Highly efficient developers must still travel non-trivial distances to achieve performance gains, and therein lies the core of my epiphany, that performance is not efficiency, and highly efficient developers must spend non-trivial amounts of time to achieve performance gains that may in fact undermine development velocity, CPU efficiency per task, architectural efficiency (DRY), time efficiency (latency), etc...