Thanks for the links, unfortunately neither provide any contribution to a solution to the issue I'm seeing.
And yes, I'm noticing a performance hit, hence the post - calling the same function and getting the same answer literally hundreds of time can't help but cause a performance degradation.
Where do you suggest a "bug report" or "enhancement request" be sent? The Developer Feedback mechanism doesn't appear to be very responsive. I just received a response to a Feedback report I filed on Dec 26, 2020 at 12:44 AM.
I have observed that this happens more often than just at start up, it appears to recur every time viewForHeaderInSection is called, witch itself appears to be called more often than necessary.
If you have any code solutions to offer, I'd be happy to receive them and test them out.