@aaz I've heard people theorise that "saved" saved searches may be more performant because NS can optimise them, but I have never seen anything official/conclusive

This is interesting. I would like to know if that's true. You know somebody who went an extra mile to gather the metrics or anyone who can support this?

A saved search can be optimized by NetSuite, but you'd have to use a support ticket to do so. Typically that level of optimization would focus on adding database hinting into the saved search, which is only possible on their end. This would really only be for searches that don't perform well to begin with because the underlying data is too large/complex. Still, the results will vary on a case by case basis. Plus, I don't know if editing a saved search that had database hinting would remove the database hinting.