what about making something that works before trying to optimize part of the not-yet-working stuff?

Because I want to switch out the if-elseif-elseif-elseif-elseif-elseif-els.... with a switch, ok?

I agree with you about optimising for performance but not for code complexity. I've just inherited some code that didn't work and was far too overly complex for what it was trying to achieve. It was the overly complex method that made it not work not my first task was to strip that out and rewrite it. Only then could I really say it made sense.

It was using two parallel threads to avoid the rate limit of an API by only making two calls every so often but the main thread was sleeping when they returned so the result was an empty list every time.

If you think about it now you wont have to rewrite half of your app...