For me at least, #2 seems most often to have something to do with fetching the results themselves, rather than the network between me and DDG delaying the initial pageload. The results page will load very quickly (the header/sidebar, sometimes the zero-click results or disambiguation results), but then there's a very noticeable delay before the regular results get AJAX-loaded.
(It is true that the the better DDG is at getting me the zero-click kinds of results, the less of a problem this is.)
#2 varies a lot depending on location and network. Unfortunately I still don't have a lot of geographically distributed servers.