Thanks for sharing your thoughts and experience. Looping is something important too!

In terms of the mast map vs index map, it really depends on the cases, if there are large amount of data in the table, looping through a master map can be much less efficient than looping through a index map, ideally an index map should have a lot less data to go through. Query plan gives some idea if the query itself hits the designed indecies or not, and to see whether the indices are built as expected to help the proformance or not. If neigher, maybe it's a good idea to improve the indecies or optimise the query itself.