Cura acting REALLY sluggish all of a sudden I've been using Cura on my computer for a while now, (at least a month) but all of a sudden the entire interface has become noticeably sluggish. Whenever I scroll through the profile parameters list or the settings visibility dialog, the list lags and doesn't fully appear.

I'm at a loss to explain why this is happening.
Cura has and/or had a memory leak (or some other similar phenomenon) that occurs if you leave it running for a long time.  I have left Cura running for days or a week or three and eventually ran into a similar problem.  One could infer that you've left Cura running for a month, though it's not clear in your question.

I update Cura a few weeks ago (maybe a couple months) and noticed that it had a substantially smaller memory footprint, so that tells me they are working on memory management.

Looking in the release notes, you can see that 2 versions ago they implemented analytics, which is possibly a reason for the poor performance.  You'll also notice a lot of new features and bugs fixed int hat version.  That means a lot of work went into it.  Coupled with the short time to another release, and I think they're working on  fixing things.

For a more precise answer, include details and specs about your PC, internet connection, mother's maiden name, SSN, etc.  I'm kidding about the last 2, but it is probably a PC or software problem that you're running into.