I honestly think that getting rid of "loading" modal and remaking the responsible JS line to append a waiting cursor to the body tag, then setting back to normal once loaded could be a good little improvement to the UI.
IMHO it's also of a more of a natural behavior for any UI rather than little pop up windows.

I don't have a patch yet, but I have looked into it during experiments in project Opal and can for sure make one fast, if the interest would be good in this one.