I would say the only practical way forward would be advice on how to tune macros. Two elements already mentioned in this thread are:
- Pre-compile. How?
- Coalesce steps. Not necessarily easy. But I would think, for example, a sequence of keystroke steps could be replaced by an Applescript step.
A third might be to use “Pause Until”, rather than “Pause for n seconds”.
This sort of advice might already be prominent. If not we could make it so.