I don't find it that surprising because there's a huge lack of awareness in the industry when it comes to profiling tools. Quite often I've seen people trying to speed up programs without once profiling to see where the problem is. More than once I've seen the supposed solution (usually caching or distributing in my line of work) actually slow things down. At times it can be almost impossible to get permission to "waste" time on performance profiling because it's not fixing bugs or adding features.

I kind of expected more from game developers, but I doubt the guys shaving micro second off tight game loops are the same ones writing the asset loading code.

Devs should follow carpentry rules for this: measure twice, cut once.