Nice! But this trick doesn't work when a bad program is written in a HLL! I once speeded up a C++ program that took 3 minutes & was in the critical path for 40-50 engineers. It was badly written and the logic was spread all over the place. It was not fixable so I took the easy way out. I looked at its inputs+outputs, fed various smaller samples to figure out the IO logic and reimplemented it from scratch. The new program ran in 0.5 seconds. It wasn't a difficult problem but nobody wanted to touch the program because it was so badly written.
I think the moral is that bad programmers will misuse whatever features they have access to. The "dark side" is less that of the feature in question and more in the lack of early intervention and proper training! People need to be taught how to use power tools responsibly & judiciously. If you take away all the power tools for the fear of misuse, you will only see mediocre work. Or worse.