There's a little writeup that I did a year ago to explain a trick that I found after having spent 3 years writing Matlab code daily, often spending too much time vectorizing everything.
http://www.gyomalin.com/reasonable_vectorization.html
The main idea is that you can get a long way just by vectorizing your code along one dimension. Some of you might have already discovered that trick, but I think it's worth being called a Matlab design pattern.
