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Also, I feel, it's a whole lot easier to refactor "clean" or "readable" code for performance than the other way around.

Make it run.

Make it clean. (and if need be,)

Make it fast.

As a dark matter developer, I learnt it as:

Make it work

Make it right

Make it fast

My interpretation of this, so far, "make it right", is to make the code and design cleaner and refactor.

Then "make it fast" came into the play, iff, there was enough push.