It's really not that simple to disable versioning and drafts. As it works today you need to have drafts and at least two versions ( for re-publishing ). But you can clean up versions after publishsing. We should add a feature for setting the number of versions to keep in the history. ( e.g. 5 versions for article 2 for forum etc.. ).
We should add more features to the versioning system so you would be able to purge old versions ( "flatten versions" ) on a pr object basis.
That beeing said. There are quite some optimizations we can do. E.g. with translations, there is an overhead in joining with the translation table.
