Wit the change to an LMDB implementation, I think the long blockchain download will be obsolete. Not sure where that is in terms of being released to live.
The wallet improvement is actually unrelated to LMDB. I'll probably get around to integrating LMDB into the wallet later, but the performance gain in the new wallet code is completely independent of that. On a modern PC you can sync a newly created wallet in under 10 seconds.
This shows the difference in wallet refresh, running on an old machine with 2.2GHz CPU - from several minutes down to 16 seconds:
https://gist.github.com/hyc/e7381c2369398f2eaa93f2bb25a31dd4If people don't have the patience to wait 10-15 seconds to initialize their wallets, they're just being ridiculous.
