Well as far as I know I haven't put any pauses in front of anything.

Basically everything is sluggish. Just using channel up/down to navigate through TiVo menus, or hitting play or pause. Not sure if it's MRF issue. I'll try removing the repeats and see if that helps. ID-0 on the MRF is the front blaster, right? I don't think I'm using that for anything, certainly it would not be intentional, as that isn't even pointing towards anything useful: the MRF is mounted on the back of the cabinet with the front blaster pointed at the floor.

Any other guidance? Would punchthroughs matter? Or using macros? When I originally set this up I did several MX-980s for me and friends: we all had different equipment, but I set up the UI to be more activity based and ended up using lots of macros to abstract things out. Yes, I'm a software engineer, and it's quite possible that I overengineered the solution into something that doesn't work well. :-)