OK, OK, you can be my editor. Just stop following me everywhere and correcting my statements. Sheesh. Normal people just turn in a resumé or something.
Strange, I've never had that many queries show up in testing the comments module, but now I see it too. I'll look into it.
Thanks for the design compliment. :) I might be changing it soon though, since white-on-black doesn't really work well for other sections of the site, like the documentation and forums.
Disclaimer: I'm the dumbass developer of Chyrp. I was pointed here by a follower. :P
55 queries? I see 18, and 20 when logged in. Something's weird there. Admittedly, it used to be quite high (116, nervous chuckle), but nowadays it hovers below WordPress' query count.
I don't know where you're getting that whole admin authentication thing from. Nowhere in the code does it do anything remotely similar to what you said. The cookies simply hold the browsing user's ID and md5ed password (the md5 is the only information on the password that is stored), which is then authenticated. It's not a username and password for the admin area. It's just the information of the user who's logged in. Nothing new.
There's no single "is_admin" check or anything of the sort. There's no "authentication to the admin". It's not an all-powerful section that checks for a single thing before giving you access to every function. The group that the browsing user is associated with must have the proper privileges to perform the various functionality that is checked throughout the administration section.
As for using salts on the md5 encryptions, I don't see anywhere in WordPress's code does that either (I just downloaded the latest copy). I might add it in to 2.0, though. Should be a fairly easy change.
If you want the software to improve (which doesn't exactly seem to be the case), I just think you should either file tickets or confront the developer (me, and a couple contributors in the IRC channel) instead of spouting off misinformation on other sites.