I don’t know but I would like to raise another point: if an user sees splash animation there is some bigger issues than how it looks. And when the googlebot sees it and gives a little bit better scores, it doesn’t care how it looks 
My point is
- how to change animation is not important
- fix all issues why Discourse is answering so slowly is something that should fix (mostly on server level) and solution on that axel could need some support
I haven’t seen any splashes after… last two updates/upgrades. That means Disourse is now faster than earlier.