I suspect the idea is more that people keep obsessing (and wasting time) about bullshit like whether iterating though a for loop forwards or backwards is faster

I suspect the idea is more that people keep obsessing (and wasting time) about bullshit like whether iterating though a for loop forwards or backwards is faster, or whether they should have public fields to avoid the method overhead from accessors - stuff that is truely, utterly irrelevant except possibly in the most extreme hot spots.