Hey @SomebodyYouKnow
I have been meaning to get a bit more traction on the improvements I've outlined in this tread but have been pretty busy lately so haven't had as much time to work on it as I would like. In any case such changes will take a while to filter into the main trunk and be released publicly.
Having said that there are a bunch of improvements you can do to EF to tune performance in scenarios such as those you are talking about, under the current releases. I would recommend reading up on DetectChanges and what impact this has on EF performance as you increase the batch size, as this is probably the biggest optimisation you can currently make with the framework. There are a bunch of articles out there on what DetectChanges does and how disabling AutoDetectChanges while in a batch can improve performance in those scenarios.
Arthur Vickers has a great article series on how DetectChanges works, and i've written an article on what these performance impacts look like as batch size increases (http://blog.staticvoid.co.nz/2012/05/entityframework-performance-and.html).
Hope this helps