"If there had been even one single man handling the database, the thought would have been raised that perchance, just possibly, a caching layer should have been used."

That statement sounds just as wrong as stating that if only a woman had been on the tech team or handling the database, that the Comicon registration system would have accepted all last names. Women are capable of deploying caching strategies just as men are capable of recognizing nonsensical name validation.

You should use some sort of caching. If you have a wordpress blog, there are several caching plugins that generate files for your Articles. Serving files instead of generating the stuff via php is way faster.