Telerik: Impression after month 3

I hate Telerik. As if Microsoft .NET controls weren't crippling enough, third parties like this had to come along and add in their own set of configurable controls. Don't get me wrong, their demos are top notch. I saw that the functionality I needed was available in one form or another and that they would get the job done just fine. I even committed to just learning to do everything on the client side with their API.

Boy was I naive. Page loads now take forever due to size and the amount of processing it takes to render all of these fancy new controls. Ajax is now REQUIRED for an application to run smoothly or else you are looking at cripplingly heavy pages in excess of 800k/load. And speaking of using Ajax to load anything, why is there no transition property? Does everything have to be so jarringly ugly in the land of Microsoft? I'm so disgusted with myself for choosing this software package and making my boss believe that it would save us development time. All I have now is the ugliest admin tool I could ever have fathomed that runs 10x slower than the equivalent in Django and is far more inflexible without a tremendous amount of custom coding and configuration.