I have not noticed PL being sluggish at all. Nothing takes long except for exporting and even that varies. I am using the latest verison on a MacBook Pro 4Max and same on the Mac Studio.
I think the point is that is has excessive hardware requirements when compared to the competition.
l love it when people with high end hardware say “well I haven’t had any problems”.
It’s like saying you have no problem finding enough power to overtake slow moving traffic… and you own a Ferrari 
I am using a Windows 10 machine from 2016 with an i7 6700 processor and 24 gb of ram. I did install an Nvidia RTX 4060 graphics card last year. While PhotoLab performance on my machine is certainly not as fast as it would be on a new state of the art machine, it definitely performs smoothly with no significant sluggishness. I don’t recall exactly what you are using, but as I am sure you know, the unfortunate truth is that over time some computer hardware upgrades are necessary as a result of newer software requirements.
Mark
Usually what one writes is interpreted according to the person reading.
In my case I am using an M4 iMac. It only has 16 gig ram but the unified memory helps get around that and the GPU is 10 core. The fact remains PL is sluggish, indeed uncomfortable to use and the Ai masking is far from being great. If I switch to Lr or others the performance is much improved. Now I know that is not a technical response but it is a factual one. It may be that that the way PL uses the GPU does not sit well with this machine as the GPU shares in the base memory (there is also some hidden vram I believe but that is getting far too techie for me). Other developers manage it ok and have spent a fair amount of effort optimising performance. It would seem though that DxO are not interested in going down that road.
That depends on what, and how, you write 
I’ve done some writing in my time, and have seen how the onus is on the author to be clear in their meaning. If there’s unintentional ambiguity, it’s on them.
Granted. Your post smacked of envy.
Exactly!
I’m with dxo since version 4
Went trough several pc and now I with Lenovo Legion 7i
Nvidia 5070 x 12 giga
32 giga,ram ddr 6
Photolab 9.91
And it is sluggish as ever before
I wondering what “sluggish” means. Im not question you experience “sluggish”. May a screen recording can be more clear (for everyone say sluggish) - as “sluggish” meaning can be different for personal opinion. May what i think is “fluid” for someone is “sluggish” and vice-versa.
p.s.: screen recording may “to slow” to show the “sluggish”, but still something.
FWIW I’ve said the same (that it can be sluggish) and by that I mean there’s a pause between a change being made and it being reflected in the image.
The pause could be less than a second (but still noticeable, as in not “real time”), or it could be several seconds.
Meanwhile with Capture One, I found that on the same hardware there was often no pause for the same sorts of actions.
Over the weekend I did some editing on a friends’ laptop with Affinity and - again - it felt like I was editing in real time. Changes were near-enough instantly reflected in the image being edited.
Coming from FPS gaming, this kind of “lag” can be incredibly jarring. Granted nobody “dies” while we wait for PhotoLab to catch up, but it’s a lot less of a pleasure to use when it does lag.
Sample screen recording. 20Mpx Oly raw. PC config: CPU: AMD Ryzen 5 3600 (3.6 GHz, 6 core), Ram: 32GB, GPU: Intel ARC B570/20GB. Monitor: only 1 monitor: 2560x1440@60. PL: 9.10
I check in Video editor: when the click happen, and when the change happen.
“Lag” - 0.13 sec for all (i just measure random 10 change) - pretty constant - except microcontrast seems 0.23s.
Note: recorded in 30fps, so i not measure smaller time interval than that. Mo mask in the photo, but basic adjustment, geometry, lens sharpness, etc. No HQ preview, no Deeprime rendering.
Yep MacBook Pro M4 24GB RAM - crap performance even with previews disabled - have tried different AI accelerator settings all the same.