Understood, but:

- I personally like to see the number of comments to see if the number of comments had changed.

- It didn't seem to work this way before, so I think it might be new, or it was restarted and just hadn't loaded yet, maybe?

- This behavior isn't intuitive.

- It was distracting to reload the same page with the same backing data and get two different results (once without number of comments, once with number of comments on topic I'd just viewed).

So, it is a (minor) bug, imo, even if it makes for a faster, more scalable page load. Speed is awesome and speed is king, but don't do things that are distracting or unintuitive to the user.