I know it's not easy to see the justification when looking at the front page, especially since Cake is still pretty young, but we designed Cake to scale to conv

I know it's not easy to see the justification when looking at the front page, especially since Cake is still pretty young, but we designed Cake to scale to conversations with thousands of posts in order to allow for the kinds of long-lived conversations that continue to attract a trickle of new posts for months or even years. Cake also uses client-side routing when JS is enabled. While the initial pageview might be on the large side since it contains all the data necessary to render the entire page (albeit gzipped for most clients, so typically much smaller than the uncompressed sizes you shared), subsequent pageviews will load a much smaller amount of data. We also use a few heuristics to avoid serving a server-rendered page if we know the client can render it more efficiently, which can further reduce the size of the initial pageview (pretty significantly actually). So you're pretty much measuring our worst case scenario. :)