You are having a highly atypical experience. For me thread loads are nearly instant, and I can't read the world RECOMPUTING as it flashes so fast that I almost never see it anymore.

I'm going to suggest that you make a few tweaks:

1) In settings, uncheck "Recompute feed periodically" or if you really want it to do so, ramp it up to 12000 milliseconds. Better to uncheck it and press "Refresh" yourself manually.

2) Set the feed chunk down to at most 12 hours, probably less in your case. You apparently can't load too many events at once.

3) Similar for the Replies chunk... maybe to 4 days or so.

4) Change How Many Relays to Query to 2 (that is what I use and it is pretty good).

I'm doing a major code and storage overhaul that might improve your situation, but it might not, it depends on whether the issue is you are following massive numbers of people, or you have a very slow network, or you are following people too redundantly or something.

If we still end up in a position where things are so slow that we need progress indicators, I'm not against doing it.