It seems to be /very/ slow to load, google and ddg both seem to load in < 1s where startpage averages around 3-5 seconds, I wonder if it provides any advantages over say using a grease monkey userscript to strip the tracking?

Interesting.

Looks like DDG has a bang for it, too: https://duckduckgo.com/bang?q=startpage

DDG has a bang for a lot of things, because it's trivial to implement them (they just redirect you to <page.com>/<something>?q=<your_search_term_here), and trivial to make a suggestion.

As a paranoid my first thought was, what is startpage.com doing with my information and searches?

Which is the right reaction, but you can read up on them; what other source of knowledge can we depend on other than that of people articulating their cause and others who substantiate those claims?