I didn't see a huge difference between doing via my plugin and directly with web2lrf, but I'll try to do some profiling this evening. I don't think my boss would appreciate me accessing that site during my lunch hour. :-)
If you want to try the command line version and see if the timing is about the same, run this from a command prompt:
Code:
web2lrf --link-levels=0 --max-recursions=0 -u http://trickster.org/res/transfig.html default