In reply to mark k..

@weston since accessing the options directly to have access to some of the widgets information was a necessity, moving that information to another place will break all the code that assume the data is in the options. How many sites will be impacted? from my personal knowledge at least 40k.

As for posts table being used for non content... well maybe it is time to start treating it like it should be treated and just create new tables if options are bad place for the data.
In the post table, since there is no autoloading, assuming you have two sidebars, you will need extra 2 (probably 3) DB queries per page load.

This will bring wordpress into "must have some caching on by default" which should have been part of core long time ago, but it should be implemented before having an architecture which will increase the number of requests.