@TheSaltydog You might find my thread here about the slow loading / timeout happy dashboard.
There are many tips that you might be able to use to speed things up, but given your Pi platform, I think the others have covered those limitations.
My NR was running on a 12 core 128Gb RAM gaming class PC and takes around 2 minutes to load my dash.
IMHO the V2 dash should not be out of alpha yet, its still mostly unusable due to lack of core features, so you will need to go down that path very carefully knowing that its a waiting game for the features to catch up with the v1 dash.
I am unable to migrate any of my current dash features over so can not make any speed / robustness comparisons as yet.
