&gt; Another downside is that it&#x27;s difficult to isolate Ion-aware code from the more general purpose &quot;business logic&quot; in an application, due to the absence of a serialization layer producing&#x2F;consuming POJOs; instead it&#x27;s common to read an Ion structure from the wire and access it directly from application logic.<p>This is indeed a common pitfall, especially since traversing Ion is slow and expensive.  I&#x27;ve squeezed up to 30% performance gain by converting Ion data to POJOs up front and just using those.