Sorry, that wasn't meant as a personal insult -- it was an exaggerated comment about the thought pattern (which I recognize, because I fall prey to it myself, even after 25 years of professional programming in numerous languages).

It was just a bit jarring for me to see the contradiction laid out so plainly: you are worried (appropriately) about how long it'll take for your script to run on real data and you want to learn how to fix it, but you'll put off the work of addressing the most costly part of the algorithm, because you want to do the simpler part first?

I guess that's okay if you want to remain a student indefinitely. But in terms of holding a job, that approach is not just "different"... Anyway, good luck.