A certain irony about knowing all the tricks and using Python is that you invariably encounter people online who say "well Python was too slow so I dropped it" when the problem they encountered is covered either by one of Python's prolific extensions or by a slight reformulation of the problem.

And, having said that, I also didn't know that some optimizations were possible until later in my programming career. There's just a point where it escapes one's current level of skill.