My guess would be a dev that knew that something was wrong with the performance of their old system, but for whatever reason it wasnt something that anyone higher up prioritized. If thats the case, I can see why one might come up with an idea of trying to solve it outside the bounds of the normal production/SQL environment. At least in my company, the only time we devs ever get to specifically look at the performance of our website is when we have "hackathon" days where we choose our own projects. I often times feel like my regular time would be much better spent trying to optimize our 2 second+ initial pageload times, instead of all the other small tasks/tweaks/bugfixes that gets sent my way. But performance is something very few people higher up seems to care about. Or maybe its a case of users and managers becoming so accustomed to something being slow they dont notice anymore.