[oneeyedpigeon]

> When you look at page speed, not much of the slow-down is from servers delivering pages, but browsers having to digest HTML/CSS/IMG/JS

I think both can be to blame, although you're right that JS load is becoming more and more of an issue. I used to work on a site that used Joomla and literally hundreds of separate database queries were executed for each page request. That is going to put a huge strain on server-delivery time, and it's unsurprising that this site couldn't handle much of a load before falling over.

Static pages are really so much faster than any dynamically-generated site I've seen. Still, I agree about JS - it's possibly time for a 'back to basics' approach on client-side scripting akin to the static page revolution that has occurred on the server-side. At the very least, I think the 'many scripts, many sources' issue needs to be resolved.