Thank you for this fantastic solution @KroMignon! I really appreciate your work improving ScottPlot 5 performance with this pull request 🚀

A few thoughts about this work:

• I hope to to benchmark performance before/after this PR using docker: SP5: How to get started using ScottPlot 5 in Docker #2851

• Your original SetField<T> function was very elegant! I'm copying the code below so it can be appreciated. However, to simplify the code I chose to put all the logic in the getters for font Name, Bold, and Italic. Your solution worked well and would have been preferred if there were more properties. However, moving this logic to the getters allowed explicit typing (preventing the need for casting) and also avoided multiple levels of if statements. In the end I favored the simplicity at the cost of a small amount of code duplication.

// strategy in the original PR
protected bool SetField<T>(ref T fieldValue, T value)
{
    if (value is string)
    {
        if (string.Compare(fieldValue as string, value as string) == 0)
            return false;
    }
    else if (Equals(fieldValue, value))
        return false;
    fieldValue = value;
    _typeface = null;
    return true;
}

Thank you again for this excellent work! 🙏