It's not just you – the new forums are bad. I'm not sure what I was expecting, but I wasn't expecting them to regress in so many ways compared to the outgoing forums.
Everything about this new site is slow – and I mean everything. Especially loading. There has to be something seriously wrong with its scripts for that to be happening. That seems to be an issue with the rest of the modern internet, too, likely because modern computers have so much processing power that optimization ends up being overlooked.
It didn't have to be this way.