Hey Josh, it's great seeing you doing well!
I don't know if you have seen my comment on the KS update, so I just wanted to somewhat repost it here.
So when I was reading your OP about how you where having an hard time finding a balance between ease of coding and performance, it reminded me a language/toolkit I used when Flash died:
https://haxe.org/. This a platform initially aimed at creating cross-platform Games created by fine engineers. The most interesting part for you should be that this high-level & dynamic language can be compiled to C++ with great performance. You can also try other targets like the recent
hashlink VM or Neko but I think it will be slower than binary code from Haxe/C++. Maybe this can help you tackle the FPLT.
Hope you and LT all the best!