I'd like to see performance improve as part of a larger update to AE's render engine. So if the underlying question is "should we modernize the core render engine" then hells yes but if we're talking about solutions akin to "render multiple frames simultaneously" then no thank you.
I'd really like to see some work done on improving the old layer based render engine to be more friendly to systems that don't have buckets of RAM to throw at a render (buckets? did somebody say buckets?). Memory management seems to be the root of all render issues I've ever run across. I can only imagine that this issue is going to grow even further out of control with the impending move to 4K.