@KayOhtie
I think these message loading ideas are good but tricky. Currently everything you view goes through your instance rather than your device, so it doesn't leak your location or IP address to a server you don't belong to. If the instance fetches the profile or some replies, it has to complete that process AND serve it to the user, which might be laggy and frustrating. Alternatively, users' devices could do the fetching for faster load times, but that would sacrifice privacy.

I can't speak to the other UX things you raised, but my understanding is that there are good reasons for some of the necessary features we want to be slow in development, given the tradeoffs involved.
@charlesroper @kissane @bersl2