I assume there are caching issues. When you send changes, they don't immediately show on the site for me as well. Wait for a while (5 mins, 10 mins maybe 15 mins...) and refresh the page and you should see them updated.
Me too, all of those, probably everyone does. They should really change the entire system to something lighter. All those AJAX requests (I assume) cause heavy load on the server.
I was thinking the exact same thing, just notify that we won something and we can click to reveal what. All this clicking was kind of interesting at the beginning but got annoying so quickly.