Preliminary memory/speed measurements for Beta 1/2 show that WP 3.4 is slower than WP 3.3 and uses more memory. But, as always, I will wait for final release to make detailed measurements.

I would like to see more details on your memory and speed profiling. I haven’t tried to measure any of that myself, but I can’t say that I’ve noticed any significant difference either way. The memory/speed improvements might be something that only shows up under certain configurations or types of requests?

I imagine the core developers will argue all these changes are good and relevant, but from an end-user’s perspective (as you appear to be reviewing from) I would agree, the core developers could have spent their time and energies on something more immediately “useful”.