Lately, I've been seeing everyone show off "on-chain already in place," and my first reaction isn't envy, but to ask: which "on-chain" are you actually looking at? Node block production has its own rhythm, RPC responses have another, and in between, there's the indexing service (many apps actually rely on it), caching one or two layers... To put it simply, the transactions/balances you're seeing are sometimes just the result of a service "just finished syncing," not that the chain is really slow; it's just that the window you're viewing is a bit delayed.

Especially now, with testnet incentives and points systems attracting everyone's attention, and as speculation about whether the mainnet will issue tokens increases, the query volume rises, RPC queuing/ rate limiting become more obvious, and you'll see the same operation: the wallet hasn't changed yet, the block explorer shows it first, and a certain Dapp is a half-beat late... I'm the same way—staring at it for a long time makes my eyes sore, so I just refresh every few minutes; going slower actually makes me less anxious.