Nostr does suck. The NDK that much of the nostr protocol is running on is BAD. Very, very non-performant. @semisol and @mleku are doing ridiculous amounts of work to improve for relays can run.

All Clients that I'm aware of are junk in terms of how data is used. Redownloading stuff, poor caching practices, etc. Are killing performance unless you have really good hardware on a really good network. This needs to change. Fundamentally, data efficiency needs to be addressed, or nostr will never be able to grow as it should.