I concur about the loading...
My post above yours was my first post from a tablet to this forum ....ever. I used to avoid this site on the tablet so that I could keep one tablet affiliate frustration free in my life.

...as far as the waisted real estate, I would rather have the finger friendly "Talk Menu" tools and "Active Topics" to the right as it is now and deal with ad free "waisted" real estate farther down the page. It also allows for faster finger scrolling once you get past "Active Topics".

One way to have our cake and eat it too would be to have a user configurable "posts per page" where you could set an amount of posts loaded to the active topics lower edge if it is bothers some. Another way might be to expand the "Active Topics" dynamically, adding more or less depending on page length.

However, I'm all for letting things settle down a bit so we all can see any features that the change has brought. Any change that has gotten 1 more member to use his tablet as it was intended can't be all bad.