Yeah, we’ve hit big performance issues in the edit screens using flexible content and repeaters for allowing clients to build their own layouts.
I wonder how easy it would be to add a setting to a field group “save as a single row”, which would save everything in that field group to 1 row. For most of our needs, we don’t need to query against the postmeta fields, so that would work fine and dramatically reduce the time spent in loading / updating pages in the back end