In reply to Rick Gregory.

You're talking about multiple different things as if they were the same. No one is going to worry about cutting 50kb from t heir site because, if everyone did it, it's a lot of data. That's just fantasy.

I don't know what plugins you're using but I rarely run into plugins that hurt performance in any measurable way and as far as I can tell WP does have decent out of the box performance when compared to other database drive CMSes (it's unfair and illogical to compare those to flat file generators).

As for site owners who can't afford to optimize things... that's a matter of poorly designed, bloated themes. You're not going to get people to abandon, say, Avada for a minimalist theme because the latter does not serve their purpose. Frankly, you're missing the entire point here and focusing on a world that does not and never will exist - one where we all only care about performance and not design or economics.