My bad, I didn't actually answer your question.

RE: reducing object counts: sure, all for it.  An unfinished piece of business on Console was to move to direct byte writing into buffers (fixed size) rather than creating objects on the heap.  The example SPI implementation does the lazy thing to help give people ideas on what can be done.  I don't think I envision one implementation to fit all needs, but if we were to supply some performance-oriented implementation then, yes, I would look to minimize heap allocations.  While it takes some work, I don't think it's too difficult assuming it is considered an important goal.

For comparison, web sites I've worked on are thankful to have performance metrics _at all_ this typically included calling out to code that would publish to JMX beans or Graphite.  None of those calls were super-cheap, but they were cheaper than the DB calls thy mostly measured.  I suspect we could implement a very low footprint version that could be consumed by most users.