The Delete Speed Test for Pages 2

Question

Hello Pages fans,
“Speed” is a subjective term, so I wonder what people will find if they do this test:
Paste a phrase such as “The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog’s back. ” ten times to make a dummy paragraph. Put the cursor at the end of the paragraph and press and hold the delete key and count the seconds it takes to delete back through the the entire paragraph, letter by letter. (This will depend on the key repeat rate you set in System Preferences.)
If I delete a particular paragraph this way using Pages 2, when viewing the document in narrow format (i.e. viewing “fit page”) it takes about 22 seconds. If I view “fit width” and stretch the width across my 23-inch cinema display the same task takes about 101 seconds.
Using Pages 1 it takes about 22 seconds (“fit page”) or about 27 seconds (“fit width”). Not as bad.
I have tried every single fix proposed in this discussion forum to speed up Pages - to no avail. I am using a Mac Mini 1.42 GHz with 1GB RAM, a 23-inch display, 10.4.5 and the very latest updates. I have no other problems whatsoever in any other applications.
Incidentally, In Word 2004 the same exact test takes about 17 seconds no matter what (whether viewed at 10%, 500% or anything in between).
Trust me- I don’t actually sit around deleting paragraphs like this all day, but I do notice a very annoying typing lag. I’ve basically given up on Pages as a serious writing tool because of this typing lag / speed issue and gone back to Word. Pages 1 works fine and served my purposes for a year, but what future does the Pages application have if version 2 performs so poorly?
Do those who report having blazing fast Pages 2 performance experience this problem with this test?
Yes, this is a dreadfully boring test! But at least it’s not subjective and it’s not as iffy as watching the system monitor percentages jumping around.
Thanks in advance for any responses.
various macs...   Mac OS X (10.4.4)  

Answer 1

True, MMINSO, I can just go use some other word processor. (Thanks for the tip.) I'm sorry to laugh at your suggestion but you entirely missed the point of my keyboard input test when you told me to just delete the whole paragraph at once.
Ee gads... we could start a flame war over this! Can anyone think of a better, more reliable speed test to measure how Pages handles keyboard input?
When I type text while viewing a document at full width across my screen, the typing is much slower than when I view the document tiny size. The typing lags. By "lags" I mean that the keyboard input is behind what I am typing. I devised a mind-numbingly simple little keyboard input test to replicate this problem perfectly. Again: This test directly replicates the type of keyboard input slowdown problem I encounter while doing normal typing. So it's certainly relevant, and it's also measurable and replicable.
Naturally, it's not the actual number of seconds that counts, it's whether any given keyboard input task slows down when we do it viewing at different widths. The keyboard input rate changes, you see.
I had hoped that someone would verify whether they experience the same lag in typing under the same conditions. In other postings, others have simply described the problem as "infuriating" and dropped Pages entirely. I don't think that's very useful. I was trying to be a bit more scientific about it in the hopes that it might actually be helpful.
Maybe there's a better way to accurately demonstrate keyboard input lags in Pages?
Maybe my machine is the only one experiencing any slowness.