That ultimately depends not upon the actual performance or the code, but the person. I have been writing software for a very long time and in that time I have

That ultimately depends not upon the actual performance or the code, but the person. I have been writing software for a very long time and in that time I have seen many people complain about performance and simultaneously measure nothing. In most cases performance is just something for people to whine about when its not them doing the work and suddenly not worth the effort when its up to them to write the performance improvements. If you can solve for that entitlement problem you will have found your own answer to this riddle. As for my own code where I know I will always be doing the work myself increases in performance are almost always worth the effort, because the result always saves me tremendous time later and clean code is solved through some thought exercise around new organization of the code artifacts.