Thanks for the advice - I never heard of pypy. Are there any downsides to making puppy the default Python interpreter? Thanks!

It's not universally supported by all packages, for instance C-based packages will not work, more info about it here: https://pypy.org/posts/2018/09/inside-cpyext-why-emulating-c...

With that being said, when it works, it works great but you have to evaluate whether it's suitable on a per-project/script basis.