In reply to mark k..

@mark you are making some assumptions which aren't necessarily true for all WP setups: you don't have to have filter and action plugins installed, neither do you need to cache things in Memcached for any longer than even a couple of minutes to greatly reduce DB load.

Working directly with the DB is not a matter of understanding, it just doesn't make sense unless you're specifically interested in WP innards.
APIs were invented for a reason and there are many other strategies to optimise server resource usage. Our main caching layer isn't even Memcached, but a CDN, so 90+% of visitor requests won't even reach the WP backend at all, people will either get prerendered HTML or stored JSON API responses from the CDN edge which is geographically the closest to them.
It's cheap, fast and efficient.

All these still doesn't mean that I'm trying to convince you that this is the right approach for you and everyone using WP, but try to keep an open mind and see the possibilities instead of trying to find faults! This isn't something which is going to replace WP themes or be a mainstream thing, but I think it opens up a completely new frontier for WP being able to serve more application like websites and applications proper (even native ones where you can't argue that an iPhone app should connect directly to the DB). And I couldn't be happier to see an open source CMS with a great community gaining this possibility!

DAIN

@daaain

Please note that I regularly don't work on Wednesdays, so I won't be able to reply or attend a meeting / call on these days. Sorry about the inconvenience this might cause to you, but my young family really appreciates this time.