> It disturbs me to think that this is the kind of world we live in. Where people lack such basic curiosity. The problem wasn't that optimization was hard, (optimization can be extremely hard) it was just because nobody gave a shit and nobody was even remotely curious about bad performance. They just accepted bad performance as if that's just the way the world is.

The problem is, you don't get rewarded for curiosity, for digging down into problem heaps, or for straying out of line. To the contrary, you'll often enough get punished for not fulfilling your quota.