You should be using prepared statements and variable bindings. You should never have to parse any statement more than once (many dynamic language interfaces even cache statements for you, and many SQLite libraries also offer an interface for this out of the box).
You should also never be formatting integers into strings, but simply binding them to the prepared statement. I really hope you weren't interpolating them and formatting each statement with the literal values in the string. That would be horridly inefficient, and a bad misuse of any modern SQL database. I also hope you were properly using transactions to speed up your batches.
An improvement is an improvement. A flaw of seatbelts is that some people still die when they wear them. That's not a valid argument to not wear seatbelts.