I'm with you. I'm a "mechanically sympathetic" anomaly amongst my age group and even many of my senior colleagues who came up in the 90s when Moore's Law == clock speed. My whining about cache thrashing and branch mispredictions might fall on deaf ears now, but I'll be ready to fix all the slow-ass code when people realize that silicon atoms aren't getting any smaller and heat isn't getting any less hot.
you have my approval :) I've been toying with the notion of continuing to focus on embedded C since most of the Computer Science d00ds I've worked with have no clue how things work "what? the runtime takes care of it" besides O-notation.