1) avoid calling geometry.xxx multiple times as each time it creates a new copy
2) use numpy arrays with correct data type, so Blender could perform buffer copy significantly reducing overhead
The fix in 0899a2a8 ensured that when you switched geometry, all other
elements (sharing the same type or representation) would also switch
alongside it. However it would lead to mesh invalidation which broke
some assumptions in the style code. The style code also repeated a lot
of the logic of switch representation (i.e. finding shared
representations) so this seems simpler.
In general the whole representation part of the code is messy and
hopefully over time it'll get better.
Andrej730