KanecoYeah, sorry but no. I have a SMF forum with 5k users and the forum has faster loading times than tf.tv. And there are plenty other examples. It just depends on the optimization or maintenance the site has.
that's really just outright not true and quite an unfair comparison to begin with.
I took a quick look at the page render times on the SMF main site forum and they're all slower than the sub-40ms render times on tf.tv. whatever delay you're experiencing with tf.tv is almost certainly caused by cloudflare's CDN (necessitated by the recent DDoS threats).
the user base on this site is also much more active than your typical forum's (a typical day averages about 1000-2000+ new posts) and almost every single one of tf.tv's ~8000 users is a singular active identity (because of mandated "real" steam account login). in many regards this site is utilized in an almost chat-like fashion rather than a bulletin board.
it's also a bit disingenuous to suggest the site should have this feature and should have that. i'm not going to pretend by any stretch of imagination that tf.tv is the paragon of forum software, but for what it was designed for--a fast, minimalistic medium for the tf2 community to connect--it does its job fairly well. for better or worse I coded tf.tv from the ground up and haven't had the resources or time to match an experienced forum software development team.
I love this community and I'll continue doing what I'm doing regardless of what comes out of this but god damn is it disheartening when comments imply it's my responsibility to do all that I do for tf.tv and indebt myself to the community simply because I make a few bucks off ads.