It's probably you. I've made no changes other than a point release upgrade to the database (didn't even have to upgrade the database data files), and I'm getting 159ms response times here. The pages are being built extremely quickly.

Any delays you see are likely network or local to your machine, and any visual changes are likely Win98/SeaMonkey/whatever funk-ass setup you have. You're on Windows; things are changing whether you know about it or not. :-P

The screen looks pretty much the same as it has for the past ~5 years here, other than the few additions I've made.

My suggestion: try it on a different machine in a modern OS and a modern browser. You might just be seeing Windows Rot.