I'll throw in my own 2 cents, in agreement. I have tried to use SPDY, Nginx 'microcaching', Drupal caching to make my own Drupal 7 project load as quickly as possible. I still need to make the font and bootstrap calls local (potentially dropping the fancy font for Georgia or Verdana, even Helvetica...) to really bring the load times down further. There are other settings to tweak still, but it's one example of Drupal not dragging its feet too much.
It certainly let this 'dev' create a usable piece of software, at least.
PS - also looking forward to Let's Encrypt and http2 in Nginx.