never be afraid to admit that you don’t know something. guessing wrong is a much worse look than not answering at all.
No exchange should allow trades to complete, I would argue in any time less than 15 minutes, and each trade should have a random 1-15 minute delay pad on top of that.
The HFT access only serve the larger financial firms, and are used to do frontloading and other basically-illegal tricks. It provides anti-competitive advantage to large firms for markets that are supposed to open access/fair trading. And of course it leads to AI autotrading madness.
I get that it keeps a lot of tech people very well compensated, but it is either in the service of unregulated fraud at worst and unfair advantage at best.
I would highly recommend you to read this book ( https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691211381/tr... ) or if it's too long form, read this article ( https://www.thediff.co/p/jane-street )
I am not saying HFT's are in charitable business but they do serve an important role in the financial markets.
I know they use a number of techniques like kernel bypass to get the lowest latency possible, but maybe they have explored some solution to this problem as well.