I've recently been exploring creating CiviCRM entities as Drupal entities - using the drupal Entity API. I think so far I have only just touched the surface of the possibilities for this integration but I thought I'd post what I think some of them might be

1. Rules integration
2. Entity Reference fields
3. Solr searching (not explored)
4. Views bulk operations  (not explored)
5. Attaching drupal fields to CiviCRM entities (within drupal) (not explored)

Rules integration

I seem to spend a large amount of time helping people to get data back out of CiviCRM. I'm a big fan of the reports framework and up until 4.2  I made a number of improvements to the core reports for my customers. However, from 4.2 I switched to doing reports in an extension. I have been doing almost all my reports in the extended reports extension and have been playing with a few ideas in that extension. Some of them are well developed, others are in the early stages.

A few months Back John Derry from The Monthly Magazine wrote a blog about how they were planning to use CiviCRM for magazine subscriptions.

One of the biggest challenges faced by the Monthly was that it was essential for them to be able to process memberships / subscriptions paid for as a gift. They needed to collect details for both the giver and the recipient.

Slow pages are annoying and they can cost $$$. But improving performance often means re-writing chunks of code and is often expensive. Bad performance hurts us all. So the question is how can we improve it.

The main mechanism we have used in the community so far for banding together to fund these things is the MIH - the tricky thing for performance is framing the MIH in a useful way.

There are some specific areas of known slowness in CiviCRM which it would be great to address and we could raise specific MIH for. Some that I am aware of are: