It does that as a stop gap measure from everyone uploading 25+ meg profile pictures and crashing the apps. It's way faster now. I enjoy the auto translate because I've been seeing a lot of international messages and amethyst makes it so fun to see these without painfully copying and pasting into a translator. I think it's all very groundbreaking stuff. If you don't like it, as you said you can fork it or make your own cause it's opensource.
Nostr can be a very heavy protocol when processing a lot of messages or profiles, I'm surprised gossip didn't work for you. It may be you just need to give it a little time to load it's local database cache and then it might go faster.
Anyway, it's fine to make your own but why get so angry at developers who are just opensourcing stuff? I look forward to hopefully you will opensource your client so we can have even more choices.