For what it's worth, I believe you; I'd be curious what the workload was / what the time window was, if you're able to say?
I could certainly see myself as having been spoiled with respect to beefy hardware and feasible workload/SLA ratios, but it's lead me to a prior where I take the age old advice against premature optimization pretty aggressively. (Starting projects in python, naive brute force implementations for a first pass, readability over a better O(N), etc)