Yeah, notaz sure is the dev of the year, and probably of most years before this year too. He didn't release a lot of PNDs (but the ones he did make are absolute top quality stuff), but the amount of behind-the-scenes development and helping of other devs (e.g. on IRC) is amazing. He is the guy who makes sure that we get all the good kernel configuration stuff, tuned very specifically to our device (many of you may think that "linux" is just "linux", but there's actually a huge number of ways to tweak a kernel). He is the guy who puts hand-written NEON code in the SDL blitter function so everything that uses SDL (and that's a LOT) benefits from the speedups. And so on.
Don't assume SZ is just a regular GNU/Linux distribution like any other. Most GNU/Linux distributions include very generic binaries that run on as many systems as possible, so many system-specific optimizations are not done. Their kernels are compiled with every possible system in mind (of course the architecture is fixed, but in the case of x86, there's usually only the distinction between 32 bit and 64 bit), so their performance will suffer. Their libraries are compiled with every possible use case in mind, so they sometimes contain quite a lot of unnecessary functionality. Thanks to the "notaz magic" sprinkled all over SZ, we really get the maximum performance out of our hardware, much more than what you would get with a generic GNU/Linux distro.