Page weight may matter, but I think amortized page weight matters most. It's like the marshmallow experiment for the web. If you can make one request at 10x the size, but it's only made 1/100th as often (presumably spans multiple pages) then as long as people come back enough to justify that initial extra cost, you've effectively decreased to 1/10th again.
That's why I think AJAX, web manifest [1], indexedDB, localStorage, etc. need to be leveraged much more. Imagine most of your app loading without making a single request, except for the latest front page JSON, or the latest . You have a bunch already in indexedDB so you just ask the server "hey, what's new after ID X or timestamp T?"
So your two minutes just became a couple milliseconds (or whatever your disk latency happens to be), and the data loads shortly thereafter, assuming there's not much new data to send back. And if you don't need any new resources, you only had to make a single request.