So a major update, the disparity might not be as large as I first thought. In fact, there might not be a disparity at all.
I do not understand it one bit; but I figured I would update this post so that my original frame rate observations are not taken as "Godot is so slow" because this random person said so, by passerby's.
Here is the situation. My computer (like most) has two graphics units, the integrated GPU (Intel) and the discrete GPU (nVidia); wait, that conclusion you just jumped to, its wrong, follow me a moment because it gets strange.
For reasons I don't understand, the nVidia chipset (which the system defaults to with Godot) runs my simple static image build at ~550 FPS (reported by Godot). The Intel chipset (considerably slower) runs the same test at 2100 FPS (reported by Godot). Yes, that's right, the slower Intel chipset is performing about 4x faster than the nVidia.
As luck would have it, my engine (for some reason) was defaulting to the Intel chipset. Which is why it appeared to be 4x faster. It doesn't make any sense, its like the world is backward, and I am still trying to figureout what is going on; but it doesn't look like my initial observations are valid anymore.