A different approach

After looking at some of the template code (block system in general and template parameter filtering (it's an entire parsing engine written in PHP)), I'm starting to question the possibility of just making Magento faster. To me, it is clear that the entire thing needs a rewrite. Maybe a rewrite can leverage some of the lessons learned from the original Magento, maybe not.

So, I had an idea to slowly replace the front end of magento by wrapping it in a framework, and replacing each page with better, more optimized code while allowing non-optimized pages to fall back into original Magento. This would instantly eliminate the PHP5 cruft which saddles each magento request with 50% more work than required to render a page of that complexity.

Once each piece is replaced, the original code base is no longer needed. The problem with this is, it's not optimizing Magento... it's just replacing Magento. But, keeping the DB tables - which some might argue is the worst part of Magento with it's heavy EAV usage throughout.