TinyMCE is, of course, always going to be large. So if it bothers you why use it? There is nothing I can really do to make it smaller. (There is a bug in 3.1.3 that might load it anyway but that is easily fixed).

All of the javascript and the CSS - which you have mainly listed here - all cache pretty well so we are only really talking about the first time load.

As to the size of the forum. Well once upon a time it was meant to be simple - hence the name. But then people started using it and wanting more and more features so it became what it is today. We do everything we can to keep things optimised. Database queries are continually mionitored and honed as is ther amount of code that is loaded at any one point.

It's also free and not mandatory. I am sure you should be able to fnd alternatives that may be lighter.

Acrtually this site is loading slower than it should… I have a gremlin somewhere although there has been talk of a problem within WP2.6 (although I have not investigated that) and it was about the time of the upgrade I started to notice it.

But I am very hapy with my hosting which usually chugs along at a good pace.