A bunch of the ed25519 stuff was dramatically improved for performance with these changes (unsure of original source, might be good to track down for licensing reasons):
https://raw.githubusercontent.com/warner/git-lockup/575b4beae8797fee4c7daa07a5ce0e33667b3c1f/src/ed25519.py
This gives what seems to be a 10x increase in performance for my machine in generating a new monero address using python code.