Nice article but nothing surprising it's similar as in Javascript creating an objects which contains some basic fields and methods. Logically nodes must be slower then AA because it contains more interfaces ... to create custom list must be faster then use predefined grid components when you avoid ContentNodes and render it based on your JSON data, of course depends on amount of data, but here was a topic about lazy loading where your own list will improve your performance as well.
When you have smaller amount of your data is faster to create an application and not so big deal with performance for user's feeling to use predefined components.