I vaguely recall @eviltrout? maybe had the placeholder solution in initial versions, but it was a bit jarring.
I had a quick look and your user.json takes about 220ms, wack on a a roundtrips and yeah this can take a second (at least from some geos)
Agree it would be nice to do something better here, it is purely a UX change. I wonder how @awesomerobot feels here? We could certainly kick off a 400ms subtle animation (grabbing data at the start) and then finalizing the card once the animation is over?
@venarius really loves this kind of stuff, maybe do a mockup here?
I would recommend picking something a tiny bit smaller here as a first contribution, this is quite tricky to wire up. Have you had a look at: