In my experience of vfx usually the same author has ownership over the whole tool, so there's no incentive to pad time. We have joked about adding in sleeps an

In my experience of vfx usually the same author has ownership over the whole tool, so there's no incentive to pad time. We have joked about adding in sleeps and removing them look impressive to users, though. Games probably have a situation more similar to what you're describing. Many games target 30fps, which is 33.3 milliseconds per frame. Each department usually gets a "budget" of how long they can spend. I've heard similar stories about padding memory usage and time, but it's hard to tell if they were serious and it's not common.