>Apparently I'm a bot. Any idea what triggers that?

HTML links, namely href attributes. That's what most bots try to post.

>Fancy floaty features like that have a nasty habit of either not working properly after taking the leap to handheld, or simply don't work at all. The old links as described were plain HTML anchor bookmarks (...)

If you mean the bottom right block of links, there's nothing fancy, it just has fixed CSS3 positioning and should display correctly on any modern mobile browser. The links still point to the same old HTML anchors, well, one anchor (#bottom.)

>Presumably the insight would gradually accumulate over time, but if that's the kind of guru level knowledge and analysis exercised just for a niche back-of-the-woods imageboard, what kind of insane wizardry is expected for professional use?

For professional use, the task is usually divided between several specialists: backend, frontend, UI designer, etc. Whereas here I have to fit into all of these roles, and I am no professional in any except general programming (I'm a C programmer) and databases (I'm a professional DBA.) Plus remember that I'm not the only one here: since 2014 GUROchan has been a brainchild of two, ryonaloli and mine. I'm the programmer, but a lot of security concepts employed are the wisdom of ryonaloli, who is an information security professional and consults me on these topics.

>I don't know if this is a client side (ie browser) or server issue, but is there any way to prioritise loading the entire html for a page before the images, or at least high enough that it can keep a good way ahead of the image stream?

That cannot be truly controlled, the loading-rendering sequence is fully governed by the browser as it sees appropriate. The issue is well-known, and I plan to address it by introducing paged threads view.

>the old behaviour was that it could be made to jump to the bottom pretty soon after loading a thread

That cannot be true: the #bottom anchor is at the tail of the page; you cannot navigate to it if it hasn't been loaded. I added a simple JavaScript workaround. Also, there's the "s" hotkey.