Hi Pandora,
Six months of experience with NetLogo is more than “new to NetLogo” for me.
And, if you have built an extensive model, I guess you know what you are doing.
Still, a runtime of hours for one simulation is huge. Either the model is inherently complicated, or there are still some points for improving the NetLogo code. An earlier post on this forum (https://forum.netlogo.org/t/guidance-on-speeding-up-netlogo-models/412) and the journal paper referenced there can be helpful in finding bottlenecks.
Anyway, using Python/R packages to control your NetLogo code do not improve performance. They still use the same NetLogo code in the end.
In my experience, rewriting the model in another language is usually not worth the effort, either.
If the model is too complicated, the only sensible thing to do is finding which mechanisms you can leave out of the model. Remember, a model does not need to include the whole system being modelled.
Using NetLogo extensions like py or sr can only help if you have some model mechanism already coded in Python or R and that code is more efficient than its NetLogo equivalent. Otherwise, they would not solve the problem.
So, the bottom line is “first find the bottlenecks in the model”.