I don't use GNOME, but I've noticed switching keyboard layout in Fcitx being slow. This is especially annoying since I have four different layouts and switching back-and-forth requires cycling through all the others.

I wonder whether this is actually a problem at a deeper layer. (Possibly that layer was originally created for GNOME.) Do you happen to have a link to a bug tracker for this issue?

2) It belongs to the part of GNOME that exists solely because GNOME decided to reinvent keyboard input.

3) Google shows lots of people aware of the problem (bugreports, stackexchange, whatever) — of course it does, see (1) — but not only no solution, but also I couldn't find any workaround short of using another DE, although — see (2) — disabling the feature altogether would be a decent workaround.

Of course all programs have bugs. Do other free programs tend to have bugs of this lasting quality?

At first my jaw dropped on your comment, but then I thought, maybe we non-latin-writing people are just abusing a feature meant for something different? Do you use several layouts, but switch between them infrequently?

It's not bad if you focus on one or the other. But when you combine the two, (talking about techical stuf, tickets, code reviews, ...) I often have to switch.

I'd say i switch on average few dozen times per hour.