Quote: "Then how is dbExcludeObjectOn different than dbHideObject?"
Eeem, good question. Hide object makes the object to not to be rendered, but it still resides in the 'object stack' and so, it is checked every loop to see if it should be shown or not, while exclude object takes the object out of the DGDK stack and no further checking is performed per loop for it, until it is un-excluded.
Bear in mind that I just talk about the documentation, I haven't really looked into the insights of the source code, but that should be the concept behind excluding objects, as far as I understood