There's something incredibly satisfying about performance tuning...it just feels good when things run fast. Of course to make things run fast in Mathematica 90% of the time all you do is recast them as a packed array problem...

I absolutely dread working with XML in WL. Would love them to revisit the functionality here.

@CarlLange I absolutely dread working with XML. - FTFY!

but, yeah, XML in WL is something almost worth kicking out to a Java or Python lib.

@kirkus I suppose it's more the semantics in WL that bother me than XML itself. I suppose the author of the XML integration hadn't seen BeautifulSoup or CSS selectors. perhaps they didn't exist back then but those are much more ergonomic ways of working with XML than the whole XMLElement pattern matching stuff

I use it here for RSS and SVG.

@C.E. Apparently I knew this once, since I had already upvoted your answer! I wish it were a part of the core language...

Let's hope that it will be. There was a meeting about it which gives us reason to be hopeful.