Those of you with functioning brains prefer larger downloads,
Why should anyone care about downloading a few extra kilobytes? It's not like anyone with a decent connection is going to notice the difference.
and waiting for full page loads before replying and after moderating?
Oh noes! Not a full page load! My god that takes almost a full second! Golly gee whiz, those extra 3 milliseconds I'm going to save by going with the crappier web 2.0 interface is totally worth it!
Ah, right, and having to refresh the page every time you change your threshold?
You actually change that on a regular basis? I thought most people just set it once and forgot it. But even still, that's a whopping one second to refresh.
Phew. Sure am glad my brain is broken then. Among other advantages, those of us with non-functional brains realize that just because a technology happens to have a buzzword attached to it doesn't mean that the technology itself is a bad thing.
The funny thing is that most of the "advantages" you talk about are either ones that no one is going to care about or no one is going to notice. Most of these optimizations really only benefit the site on the server-side end.