Earlier quoted context omitted.
So I guess that a lot of those 80 hours were spent running the test suite between changes?
Yep. I should add that the current crop of models is much more tolerant of something like this, compared to where we were a year ago - as in, they are quite willing to wait for a long time for the test or profiling run to finish without giving up on it, if the instructions make it clear that this is normal and expected.
I think that waiting or not is mostly up to the harness, not the model itself.