MOSS 2007 - Data Caching Vs List Iteration

MOSS developers most of the time need to retrieve data from SharePoint Lists. In one of the MOSS project I worked there were several provisioned .ASPX Pages which lacked in performance. The pages took more than usual time to render, on average a page displaying 1000+ List records (we are not discussing Pagination here) was taking approximately 2 minutes! Coming from ASP.NET/SQL background this was just unacceptable.