I think the problem with the old filters--beyond technical issues that are over my head, but caused the heavy load--was that the things like category, warnings and rating that have a finite number of possibilities were lumped in with the infinite fandom, pairing and freeform tags to be filtered on because they all function the same way in the code. And things users want to filter on, that aren't tags, were left out because they're not coded the same way.

But users don't care about code. I would expect to see a one or two click filter on all those finite categories along with crossovers, fic/podfic/vid, word count etc. right there on the page with the list of work blurbs. I would really not expect to have to go to a search page to do that.

I don't know if that means a big code change or not, because my understanding of the load issues of the filters is pretty rudimentary.