It's interesting how one 'small' change can affect speed so much. During this morning's internet downtime, I was poking through some Moire drawing code looking for places to possibly optimize performance. This led me to write a quick performance testing script with hotshot that tests the runtime differences between dict.get(key) and dict[key]. 
 
It turns out that the dict.get() method is exponentially (haha *poke* at a comment someone made) faster than the indexing (?) method. I'm assuming this is due to the fact that the latter raises a key error if the key is not found. This may actually be something worth keeping in mind from now on. 
 
By the way, The Python Challenge has me in its grasp again.