I talked to Havoc about our use case and we both came to the conclusion that it's rather degenerate. Config is built and generalized for config, not for repeated fast lookups like we do here.

Your spidey-sense is correct. It's a bastard wedged in to minimize the changes and be binary compatible. Thanks for reminding me to open a ticket https://www.assembla.com/spaces/akka/simple_planner#/ticket:3767