speeddata looks absolutely amazing as an alternative to (what's also an amazing piece of OSS) Scribus and (in my mind the paragon) Framemaker.

For technical documents, I've been using: TeknikCenter (for maintaining build scripts and asset management) + Bibtex + Tikz (for graphs/charts, etc) & I can get a final PDF that's fairly close to something I consider nicely laid out (https://www.utdallas.edu/~herve/abdi-awPCA2010.pdf - John Wiley & Sons, Inc's template done in some variant of TeX (apparently Wiley, Elsevier, Springer all use TeX for their masters which go to plate for press)). Scrbook, memoir and book all are 'almost there' but not quite.

Images have been pretty much the most difficult problem to render 'properly'. Using DOT has alignment/font aesthetic issues, especially if I use RST or DocBook as my 'base' document and want to output both to a blog in long-form, available in the classic TeX output (e.g. https://www.mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/full-text/book/book-Z-H-1....) as well as in the "one-page" long-form.

I guess this is a long-winded way of asking, if you have any suggestions (I've read your site and it lacks a "I'm a TeX power user, here are the idioms/conventions/best practices for speedata).

FYI, I'm perfectly okay with half a second (in fact, that's way faster than my TexNicCenter renders!) for what it's worth. Heck, I'm sure some of the old timers remember the troff wait times. Believe youme, it's no trivial feet to get typesetting correct and output in under half a second! Good on you + your team.