Just shipped some fixes that should speed up the site some by making fewer round trips to the DB on a typical page load.

It can be optimized further. From a strict performance perspective, ideally we hit the DB once with a primary key lookup. We currently hit it 10s of times with some complicated queries.

While it's important to maintain normal forms of the underlying data (for safety/sanity), we can denormalized a lot of stuff in triggers over time ... code is getting to the point where I should probably spend a week refactoring though.