>True, but then I'd rather spend my time rethinking the design - are the tables truly normalized, are we pulling the same data over and over by various SQL statements, what bottlenecks are there, is there too much unnecessary code in the refreshes, do we still carry workarounds for bugs which were fixed in VFP6 etc etc.
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>I'm guilty as anybody else of spending a lot of time tweaking a feature or two until they performed smoothly - and in some cases, rewriting the whole thing fourth time until it became blazingly fast. For one of the latter, I was lucky, because it was something we really needed, and it became a feature that set us apart from competition.
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>For some other cases, I really had to put the finger to my forehead and stop to think - am I really going to work eight hours over something that will save forty users five minutes a year?

You are right. I always optimize storage, as it is a design feature (the design of the database). You just cannot desing badly on purpose.
And I only optimize performance (more than the typical) when it is a problem, or you can get something else (like the advantage over your competition that you mention).