It's unfortunate that they never hit their original 5x performance boost. Hopefully acceptance into CPython will help.
I propose my own python implementation for acceptance into the source tree. Right now, it's a single empty file (but I've got lots of ideas!). I'll even consider it a blocking issue if it achieves less than 10x speedup using half as much memory.
Give 'em a chance. They're only just out of the gate. :)