Heh yeah, the Mathjax API is rather awful. Tons of separate file requests, configuration is only designed to work in inline script tags, and other ugliness. We've been experimenting with MathQuill - it's way faster and much more lightweight. Unfortunately it doesn't have all the features that we need otherwise we'd switch right away.
// Yuck! There is no god. John will personally gut punch whoever thought this was a good API design.
https://github.com/Khan/khan-exercises/blob/master/khan-exer...
:)