wordpress's rewrite mechanism is a mess and it doesn't help that the person in charge doesn't seem to care. the most wanted permalink structure causes serious

wordpress's rewrite mechanism is a mess and it doesn't help that the person in charge doesn't seem to care. the most wanted permalink structure causes serious performance issues and extremely useful options are missing. the rewrite rules are stored as a huge serialized array in a database field which can grow to several megabytes. configuration is only available for posts, the permalink of category archives don't confirm to the permalink of posts in the categories. and unused rewrite rules are stored - even those belonging to features that can be explicitly turned off. a much better solution would be to store THE permalink of every entity as a fixed string and if any component changes, just add / move the old permalink to the post meta table to support redirects and whatnot. as far as i can tell, all of this could be done with the current plugin api.