I've worked a number of places where the engineering culture discourages any sort of fishing expeditions at all, and if I weren't so stubborn everything would take 2-4x as long to run as it does. I say engineering culture, because at 2 of these places everyone was frustrated with engineering because the customers wanted something better, but the engineers would point at flat flame charts, shrug, and say there's nothing that can be done.

Bull. Shit.

There's plenty that can be done because there are parts of a process that don't deserve 15% of the overall budget. The fact that they are taking 1/6 of the time like 5 other things is a failure, not a hallmark of success. Finding 30% worth of improvements with this perspective is easy. 50% often just takes work, but post-discovery much of it is straightforward, if tedious.

My peers are lying with charts to get out of doing "grunt work" when there's a new feature they could be implementing. But performance is a feature.