@bohndorf there was a big change to related data handling in the last release (2.3.1,) specifically this commit here: https://github.com/dreamfactorysoftware/df-sqldb/commit/b5d3e5e3a5d722b4765f6af1ca325820b75fb00d
You should see greatly improved performance on related data. In one circumstance I tested, I was able to reduce API call response time by 1/10.