I stand (sort of) corrected.
While I do believe there is some value in my request, I just found out that Picard was not responsible for me growing a beard.
It was the wikidata-genre plugin.
Without it, there is no delay to speak of, and I would probably never have brought this up.
It’s only with this plugin that everything slows down to a snail-like pace.
I’ll try to contact the developer to see if something might be done about it.