From a user's perspective that's fair comment I think.

At the same time, that iteration of the development roadmap did get finished and did get into production and does work. That is a huge success given the size of the challenge at hand - implementing almost total anonyimity whilst keeping the blockchain as transparent as bitcoin's.

In any major software or engineering project, performance and optimisation are usually the last priorities to be addressed because things have to work before they're deemed worth optimising. So for me, everything is being done in the right order.