Optimize/Cleanup

No idea what performance increase this will give, there will be one for creation though. There are also optimizations throughout that will give slight speed increases and protect against falsey compares.
Speed isn't particularly important at initialization time, especially measured in microseconds. Doing it the original way produces cleaner code.

On another note, why are you so defensive about it? There are several clear issues with this pull request. You should expect friction when you make large changes and disregard the established coding style.