TextEditor starts up much more slowly than it used to

[kentonv]

One of the great things about early versions of TextEditor was the fast startup time compared to Etherpad, but it seems this has regressed lately. The network tab of the Chrome dev tools suggests two main causes:

1. The Meteor Javascript bundle is now 101K compressed, and this takes a while to push through. This seems surprisingly large for the functionality offered, so I wonder if this couldn't easily be fixed by removing some unnecessary dependencies.
2. After downloading the Javascript, the app downloads a series of small html files. This seems unusual for a Meteor app -- normally all the templates are compiled into Javascript. Is this Polymer's doing? None of the files are very large, but there are some 20 files to download and the browser will only send a few requests at a time, so lots of time is spent waiting for round trips to the server.

I suspect both of these problems could be improved considerably with not too much effort. Note that when testing locally, it may help to turn on Chrome's "throttling" mode in the network tab, which causes it to simulate latency or bandwidth constraints.