[throwaway7644]

What you are describing is a false dilemma, believe it or not, it is possible to have both performance, maintainability and correctness.

To have performance, you have to understand the data you are working with and how it can transformed efficiently by your hardware. To have maintainability you have to create good abstraction around how you transform your data. To have correctness you have to implement and composite those data transformation in a meaningful way.

All of those things are orthogonal.

[reader_mode]

And to have all that with budget and time constraints >90% of SW development is faced with is unrealistic - so guess what - performance is the first tradeoff. Which is why people here lamenting on performance being like this holy grail feature are out of touch with the realities of SW development.

[chromanoid]

Budget and know-how is the limiting factor here. You can invest in all of the quality criteria. But is it sustainable business wise?

Game developers usually and rightfully skip maintainability and invest barely enough regarding correctness. Games are like circus performances while business apps should be made to run the circus.