I had a VP of Marketing at some company tell me they will be using saved searches which they will reference from a script in their integration with our system. I asked if they could instead build the search entirely in the script so we don't need an additional saved search and the concern that it could be modified or deleted, breaking the integration. He said doing that is less efficient because it has to pull the entire results PRIOR to filtering, whereas running a saved search is much faster because it doesn't have to pull every record first.

My understanding is that "filters" in scripts operate the same as "criteria" in saves searches through the UI. If there's a remote amount of truth to what he said, I'd be flabbergasted. Tried not to argue with him much, but I subtly expressed a thought of, "dude, you're a marketing VP, I'm a developer. Do you really think you know better than me?"