The meow 0.4 was faster at short keys, but failed at the smhasher "LongNeighborTest" [1]. However, doubling the AES rounds makes it pass that test. Two rounds is enough for full diffusion in AES [2]. I recently looked at computing 4 Meow keys per hash function [3], and found the speedup to be almost 2x in a microbench. That puts it in rare territory for hash speed.

[1] https://github.com/injinj/smhasher/

[2] Section 5.4 of Introduction to Cryptography by Trappe and Washington -- It can be shown that two rounds are sufficient to obtain full diffusion, namely, each of the 128 output bits depends on each of the 128 input bits.

[3] https://github.com/raitechnology/raikv/blob/3ce2b23e0d9853fe...

Indeed, regarding portability moew was definitely made with gamedev in mind, without concern for portability.