The query is not always faster. Your query very likely searches the
index with the wildcard filter "stepsitem__%" (should not be that
expensive) and finds ALL nodes with that name, performs a path lookup in
the repo (unless the path is also part of that index), and then filters
the result according to ACL etc. Depending on the amount of
"stepsitem_%" nodes in the repo, your query might load thousands of
potential hits which are then eliminated by the path filter. The runtime
performance might va...