also, re: your edit, which came in while I was replying and I forgot to address in my response BECAUSE I'M RAMBLING TODAY BECAUSE IT'S BETTER THAN DEALING WITH THE UMPTEEN BILLION EMAILS STILL IN MY INBOX: highly customizable was the LJ theory for just about everything for a very long time and we try to keep it the DW theory as much as feasable, and "deeply terrible" is a good description of it. Not only performance issues, but UI/UX issues as well -- LJ/DW is so customizable that it's not intuitive for a lot of people and there are a ton of things that are difficult to explain. Conversely, however, the fact that it is so customizable is a major selling point for a lot of people, and removing or redesigning options/making things less customizable risks angering people or breaking edge-case uses -- and there are a lot of edge-case uses. (Like, most people only use 20% of the site features and options ... but everyone uses a different 20%.) Witness the uproar every time LJ makes radical changes to something...

I'm a lot more willing to support options and under-utilized features than mark is (he always wants to rip things out, lol) but we've tried to do a lot of simplifying, and there's still a lot we could do.