Well if most production parsers use hand-written parsers (and aside from SQL databases, they mostly do) I don't think performance would really make sense to be

Well if most production parsers use hand-written parsers (and aside from SQL databases, they mostly do) I don't think performance would really make sense to be the reason anyone chooses parser generators. I'd be curious to read any posts/papers you've got that have benchmarks that show performance to be a reason.