It's because Python is slow everywhere, so it's hard to find bottlenecks like this. This method is easily 100x slower than need be. If everything else were well

It's because Python is slow everywhere, so it's hard to find bottlenecks like this. This method is easily 100x slower than need be. If everything else were well written, this would stand out. Since lots of Python is written like this, none stand out. Death by 1000 papercuts....