Everybody is free to do what he/she thinks is worth for. I do agree with you that this effort is stupid, because from college we experience that assembly code ("real control" of the machine) can be faster an more efficient. But at a very very (f*****g) very high cost. I can think of this guys 13 years ago thinking like: "Dude, I can't live thinking that people don't know that assembly code can run better than anything, I will spend any time is necessary to prove it". Sad thing is they are trying to prove something we all know.

It all depends in the definition of "performance" that you want to establish. If performance for this projects means just "raw machine cycles used in specific task", then yes we all know assembly will outperform anything (given you have huge amounts of resources, like time and money) BUT if you define performance also by "results obtain VS resources spend" then you will never win using assembly code.