MAX vs Something Else

I now need to figure out what program to use. Right now I am mostly using MAX/MSP 5. It works but it currently is a little slower than I want. I will however change the baud rate on the XBee and speed up one of the metro objects. This should decrease the latency of the program. Also it is only working with one Xbee and not seven and no data going back to an Arduino. I am mainly using MAX because it can interface with LUA and now the Ogre engine. The LUA is pretty fast but I know nothing of the Ogre engine. As I stated before if worse comes to worse I'll have to take it into C or Python which might add another semester to this project.