Speeding up Maxima would be nice. In fact, I have improved the speed of
parts of Nset and of GCL's sort routine and am always aware of speed
issues (probably too aware).
However, I think it is FAR more important to improve Maxima's
correctness, documentation, coverage, features, and usability. That
is, we need to correct bugs (the bug list is long), write good documents
(our current documents are incomplete and rough), add more mathematical
functionality, improve features (e.g. plotting), and make it easier to
use.
-s