Slowness of drupal.org: Can this be fixed or at least explained?

I'm relatively new to drupal, but I'm enthusiastic about what I see so far... except for a strong concern over unacceptable slowness.

I see that this issue has been raised before, eg: Nov 22nd, but it is still a problem.

To reiterate: If drupal.org is slow, it:

a) Gives the impression that drupal software is unacceptably slow

b) Makes pages on drupal.org impractical to use as for learning about drupal, for reference, or for keeping up-to-date on developments.

Ignoring that there's a problem implies that this is as good as it gets. I see that there are some Handbook articles on performance (though "Case Studies:Big Drupal Sites" goes nowhere..), but if even drupal.org isn't successfully implementing these, what are we to think? If there's no funding to fix the problem, then one compensation would be to at least characterize it -- "yes, it's slow, but this is unrepresentative because X, Y and Z".

Some figures. These are representative, over several days, day or night (night maybe slightly faster, but still slow), two different locations in San Diego CA (drupal.org appears to be hosted in Oregon, our neighbor, right?), two quite different ISPs (cable and DSL), IE and Firefox on Windows, and Firefox on linux.

Main page 3-5 sec
/project 2-6 sec
/project/Modules < 2-6 sec
/project/Modules/name 10-15 sec [*]
/forum 3-8 sec [*]
/handbooks 4-7 sec [*]
/node/23743 (Major handbook sections) 2-11 sec
/node/258 (Installation and configuration) 4-10 sec
/project/issues 8-15 sec
/node/add/forum/12 (post new) 6 sec

By contrast:
joomla.org initial page 1-3 sec (probably DNS time, because reload is immediate)
Subsequent pages: virtually immediate.
joomla forum: slow for first page. Subsequent pages visibly start to load almost immediately, and complete within 1-2 sec.

Of special interest are the drupal items marked [*]. In these cases, the browser indicates that the page has arrived quite quickly (progress bar completes), yet the previous page is still there... until after 10 secs (or whatever) the new page actually arrives.

This is especially bad because it makes it look like the URL actually doesn't work. Eg: starting at /project/Modules, clicking on the "By Name" tab has the effect as though the URL for that tab is incorrectly pointing to /project/Modules, the current page (unless, counter to all feedback, the user waits an additional 10 secs).

I really hope that this can be improved or explained, so that all of the valuable work here can be better showcased and more confidently adopted.

Thanks,

Graham