Storage Engine for Information Schema (SHOW views)

Information Schema tables, despite tablating data in storage engines (typically MEMORY). still fills its views with the entire data, field by field.
For example, the code behind SELECT ... FROM information_schema.SLAVE_STATUS calls store_* functions sixty times whether it's SELECT * or SELECT Connection_name.

Leveraging the column-filtering (and maybe even caching) capabilities of a storage engine or two, be it MEMORY or PERFORMANCE_SCHEMA, could improve performance.