Don't take me wrong, I'm not a proponent of being "dumb" with performance either. However, I'm perfectly okay with using the standard libraries like JSONObject & AsyncTask until they prove to be too slow.

Thanks to a decent architecture the usage of JSONObject was confined to just a few methods that had to be refactored. There were a few more AsyncTasks we had to switch out, but in the end the refactoring took about two days which I would find to be perfectly acceptable "losses" compared to researching the performance of every single class before using it.

I definitely see where you're coming from though and I'll be sure to not throw that quote around without a better explanation in the future (at least on HN).