I care most about perf/responsiveness as I navigate the site. GR was tolerable on this metric while I still used it, StoryGraph (for understandable reasons) is abysmally slow somehow.

I have the same complaint about BoardGameGeek. If it was super snappy to go with the dated design, I wouldn't bat an eye, but it is also kind of a slog.

Both are things I use for discovery a little bit more than I use to record my thoughts about my previous experiences, so my browsing behavior is very breadth-first search and that makes the slow loads more of an acute problem for me.