What if I'm trying to read their offerings on my phone or tablet? A lot of the things these pages load are not worth the time it takes to load them.

They have mobile offerings. Theverge, in particular, Loads in about a second on my iPhone5.

In the case of theverge that works, but some "mobile-optimized" sites are worse than the desktop site. For example, navigating to extremetech.com from my ipad 1 takes 20 seconds over wifi before the page is interactive. After load, interaction is still slow and unreliable (and downright buggy). If i force it to use the desktop site the page loads faster and interacts more smoothly.

It's amazing but many mobile editions same to only be designed to make a screenshot to demonstrate to management that the site team did something mobile. Doesn't anybody ever actually try out these sites?

Mobile sites suck. I often change the user agent so I can see the desktop site on tablet or tethered laptop.

In that case I don't understand your argument.

You don't want to use full site because it has too many features and have, therefore, too big size.

You also don't want to use mobile site because it doesn't have all the bells and whistles.

Chose one :) ... or use Opera Mini and/or ziproxy on your server

False dichotomy... Either use a broken mobile site with half the content, or a full site that barely loads.

No, I'm saying that the 'features' on the full site are rarely worth the time and bandwidth required to load them. I'm not complaining about things like Google Earth or other high-bandwidth services, but the amount of visually and functionally useless cruft on many sites, news sites in particular.

I did consider this when using those as examples, but they were the first that sprang to mind. The sites that are utterly unusable tend to be forgotten entirely.