I made a Lua script which reads the file and writes out a C header file.
Excellent choice. When I was playing with fonts and I needed to reverse rows/columns or do similar stuff I used Lua.
I think that limitations are ultimately good and bring out the creativity in us.
I agree in principle. The concept of solving slow execution by just getting a faster processor (or more RAM) means you aren't actually attempting to find better ways of using existing hardware.