We do post measures of speed ups when they are introduced, such as we did with the faster caustics in 12 Update 1 (though this was better expressed in terms of quality, given that any speed up would depend on how dominant the caustics were in the scene, so this was "caustics are about visually twice as good in the same amount of render time")
And there have been "x% speed ups" in releases in the past. Thing is, the algorithms and calculations are now very well optimized, and as such there is less opportunity for something that is just a raw speed up to rendering time, and as noted most improvements that Corona can give are about speeding up YOU by making the workflow easier, with rendering time speed ups most often coming from hardware improvements.
For instance,
https://www.chaos.com/blog/corona-renderer-7-for-3ds-max-released had some noticeable and measurable speed ups.
Ultimately though, light transport calculations are what they are and as time goes on there are less and less ways in which they can be improved upon (if you've done your job well in the first place and things are handled efficiently) so this is why over time improvements are less about faster renders and more about faster you :)
As a note, for speed ups we don't want "cheats" or "approximations" or "short cuts" because Corona is focused on accurate, realistic results, so any speed up has to come without any sort of compromise in result to achieve it. This is one of the reasons you can see claims of speedups for GPU renders, e.g. "now 3 out of 4 frames are AI approximations, rather than 1 out of 4 frames!" is the kind of thing that wouldn't fly for Corona, were there a CPU equivalent, at least not for final renders (you can see a similar 4 times speed up by using the new Upscaling, which is fine for test renders and that can be very valuable, but it's not really applicable to final deliverable work).
Hope that helps!
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