It's a shame then, after years of working in SQL, that you hurt the query processor optimisation like that.
Having a sub query, instead of a join, the query propcessor is forced to evaluate your subquery and spool that (probably) to a temp table, then join to the outer query table, increasing I/O overall.
If it was an inner join, then the query processor optimisation could leverage index joins and get things done faster.
Also, just a joke, but even funny SQL responses propegate poor practices.
See what (more) years of SQL has done.