Has the attempt to improve computing power failed?

[Arkarnia]

To directly answer OP, the pop group change achieved one of the core objectives: improved performance for pops. In late game, where it matters most, there are orders of magnitude fewer pop groups than there were pops in 3.x. There is good evidence that this had the desired effect, including the amusing example of a bug earlier in 4.0.x accidentally creating more than 1,000,000 pops and this had no noticeable impact on performance.

Perhaps the whole thing can be perfected and the efficiency of the calculations reduced entirely to a counter for jobs and population, as my proposal included. Now, the calculation would have to be split between ethics and characteristics, but I'll have ideas for that later.