Not only that but some of the code inside avrdude is pretty dumb.
The AVRdragon is very slow in some cases because of avrdude.
In some cases avrdude poorly layered an internal byte API on top of the USB block interface.
As a result, it sometimes fetches a 512 byte block over the USB for every single byte.
So the same 512 bytes of memory ends up getting fetched 512 times to read all of it.
barf....
--- bill