Not the parent poster, but going to the first Discourse forum in my history:

http://imgur.com/BoPPL0i

72 requests, 50s load time, 3.5mb data. It would have been smaller if you'd served the screenshot of the page.

HN for comparison:

http://imgur.com/a/8qaIN

6 requests, 50kb, 0.72s

Now how about your contemporary forum competition.

Here's a Xenforo forum:

http://i.imgur.com/tlzZ5WN.png

19 requests, 2mb, 5s

And that's with the massive background image you can see, which is 1mb in size by itself.

EDIT:

Since Jeff stated the comparisons weren't apples to apples, xenforo.com/community vs meta.discourse.org . Both boards running in basically stock configuration from their own sites:

* Xenforo.com: 43 requests, 1.4mb, 4s

* meta.discourse.org: 73 requests: 3.2mb, 4.5s

http://imgur.com/a/SihGh

Definitely a better showing than the ACEO forums, but still loses the comparison.

Too lazy to take more screenshots, but reddit is 50 requests, 1.3mb, 3s for comparison.