Fiddling Around
You're in the right place.

I’m trying a temporary theme to see if it solves some technical issues.
UPDATE: Back to the old theme for now. While it did solve some backend issues with editing (we haven’t been able to see blockquotes for years, for example), it didn’t solve the sluggish page load and caused some other display issues.
Thanks for the explanation. Opening this was a big, “Huh?”
It kind of feels like visiting a parallel universe.
@gVOR10: Yeah, I figured.
The verdict thus far is that this theme solves some longstanding backend/editing issues but, alas, does not solve whatever is causing the site to load so slowly. I’m strongly considering giving up self-hosting the site an moving it to WordPress.org or the like. This site is just too big to manage with 60,000 posts, 1.5 million comments, and thousands of images.