Any word from Jables on optimizing the lobby, how high it is on the priority list, if it is on the list at all. It would be great to have a real-time lobby too - so the screen loads and shows the available games within a very short amount of time (like 0.1s). Waiting for the games to show up is the largest avoidable delay to the game in my opinion.
Lobby polish and updates are being worked on, and even more are planned in the future. You should see improvements on this, and know @sorian is pushing it internally
The problem with games showing up in the lobby browser can actually be fixed by a mod called "optimize user tag map" by @mikeyh