I wouldn’t go as far as very quickly but it’s certainly less slow.
A substantial improvement but still not where, IMO, it should be – or even used to be before the update.

I’ve just had to refresh the page 3 times to actually get anything to appear at all.

The ridiculous over usage of the quote facility bugged me too and not having it is an inconvenience.
However, “we” had been asked many times not to do it before they finally lost patience.

On current form, I expect this will appear mid-morning tomorrow.

The basic answer is no. That’s partly what I was suggesting in my post #10, our aircraft factories were already running at pretty much maximum capacity producing “warplanes” for want of a better description..

At the moment, it’s certainly less bad.
Still looks terrible though.

Delete

As an aside to the shortage or not of aircraft designers, which I agree seems unlikely, I’ve either read or seen a programme recently that said we were desperately short of draughtsmen.during the war.
Regarding the agreement which I’ve also seen debunked, I wonder if another reason was priorities. Until 1943 or so we didn’t actually need transport aircraft anywhere near as much as we needed bombers and fighters. Home transport was handled by the railways and other theatres of war were so far away that shipping was the only option.
It was possibly not so much agreed as accepted that by the time transport aircraft were actively needed, the U.S. would have taken up the shortfall.

But, it could have been useful as an engine test aircraft. With the spars running between the engines, there was nothing in the way so literally anything could be made to fit.
As it turned out, AFAIK, it was only used for the Gyron, which probably couldn’t have been fitted to any other airframe of the era.
That ended up as a waste of resources. Despite being hugely powerful by the standards of the day, it wasn’t a very good engine.

I don’t know if it’s unique – I suspect it might be – but it’s certainly unusual.

Most of the time it’s not a problem and could even be considered a good thing as things have developed over hundreds of years but, unfortunately – or fortunately depending on the circumstances – it means there isn’t a document that anybody can refer to and say “It sez ‘ere…” if it seems necessary.