woeful seems a little harsh :-)

There is a current workaround for the issue you describe: use many containers. However, there are 2 ways to solve the issue for good. One (the simplest) is to have dedicated hardware for the account and container servers, and provide that hardware with plenty of IOPS. Our testing has shown sustained 400 puts/sec on a billion item container with this kind of deployment. The other solution is to change the code to automatically shard the container (transparent to the client) as it gets big. This is something we (the swift devs) are working on. I hope that it will be done in the next several months, but, of course, a complex feature like this is hard to fit to a predetermined timeline.