[SOLVED] Atahualpa performance versus Thesis, with Yslow, is Atahualpa too "heavy"?

I have had recurring performance issues with Atahualpa, some seemingly related to poor hosting, yet I have found Atahualpa consistantly under-performs good commercial themes like Thesis. See for example the YSlow reports on the following site:

http://www.byobwebsite.com/subscribe-to-our-site/
a fairly heavily "loaded" Thesis site (Wishlist, Simple Press etc)



Compared to my Atahualpa site
http://wpacademy.tv/members
(note the outer pages are done with WP SPire plugin, this is the inner page done in Atahualpa)



Notice that the Thesis site has 300k of "empty cache" requests, compared to my 500k (with the same or less content) and, what is even more disturbing, their 10k of "primed cache" requests, vs my 40k. I am particularly worried about the 24k of dynamically-generated CSS in Atahualpa, that seems must be downloaded and parsed at every page load.

So the question -- Is Atahualpa too "heavy" for commercial sites?

Has there been any work on Atahualpa performance and optimization? Is anyone willing to bid me on doing some work on this (and then put the work back into the public theme)? I would rather do this than simply switch to Thesis, as I have gotten so much value from the theme and from the community

Note that I haven't analyzed this with W3 Total Cache and CDN yet, but as far as I know the 24k dynamic CSS download would remain. (I will doing it now and post an update maybe)