In my experience, it's pretty rare for a project of this maturity to continue to get faster and leaner--usually you see more features and bloat bringing perform

In my experience, it's pretty rare for a project of this maturity to continue to get faster and leaner--usually you see more features and bloat bringing performance decreases. Somehow SQLAlchemy has managed to not only add features, but get faster and more efficient (even if these profiles do exaggerate its improvement over time.) It's an excellent project.