Well... I don't have a machine to test with [at home or at work], so I'm going to continue on with the idea in mind that some machines will function better with AIO on, some off, and some will need the AIO read/write values adjusted. There are some other bits at work that can help performance with machines with higher core counts (kern.hz=100, pre-FreeBSD 9.x), so that might fix the interrupt issues, amongst other things.
8.0.3-RELEASE-p1 images will be posted near the end of the day, fixing the DHCP/DNS functional regression in 8.0.3-RELEASE, update ataidle from 2.60 to 2.72 based on the lead developer's feedback, fix the inadyn port on i386 permanently, fix xvid port build race condition issues, as well as the NFS without reboot bugfix noted by an iX customer.
This should close out the 8.0.3 RELEASE chapter so I can move on to testing out 8.2.0 for release in February or so.