I didn't downvote but it could be you got some downvotes because calomel has a bad reputation among BSD people. They have put bad and dangerous advice in their tuning and performance posts. People who follow this advice and shoot themselves in the foot sometimes come to the mailing lists looking for help, and it turns out their problems were caused by copy pasting from an unofficial source instead of reading and understanding the documentation.
I tried out many of the popular shells (bash, zsh, fish, etc) many years ago when my daily driver was an older thinkpad, and some of the startup times were painfully slow for me. It definitely drove me toward the more minimal shells like ksh and rc. On newer hardware it hasn't been noticeable, but it's real.
