maybe because i've time-profiled it?
maybe because i've calculated the time it took to instantiate a new AR object for every new db record?
maybe because the results show that the AR component took the largest portion of the page loading time?
This tells me that you have pages with very little rhtml in them, but they (somehow) require many DB-mapped objects. Sounds like an anomaly to me. But perhaps this is just a nature of your app, in that case dump the slowest objects and don't use ActiveRecord for them.
Another good suggestion was already mentioned few posts back: when creating your objects, load only those attributes that matter.
Good luck, and hope you'll resolve your performance issues.