Pull request #9095 has a boot up overhaul that centralizes most of the data fetching so that it can be cached (by file in dataroot or in memcache). Stuff cached:

• site and active plugin entities
• plugin settings
• subtype data
• datalist and config data

With this in place, boot requires 5 queries: 1 to fetch a few datalist values, 2 to verify session and load the user, and 2 to fetch $user->icontime and $site->email (both pull all metadata for those entities). Notably missing are an expensive query to load plugins, and a whole lot of queries to load plugin settings.