In general Unity really seems to have a much more proactive and effective manner of bugfixing lately, looking at how they are handling stuff through their blog posts from their lead QA folks. So that gives me particular extra hope that either they will resolve this on their own (if they have not already, which is still unclear), or that once we have time to hunt through this stuff they will resolve it then.
I'm not sure it will get fixed without a reproducible case, though, as our use of WWW to load textures at runtime appears to be relatively rare. To the extent that I even now I can google for "unity 4 WWW load time" and not see any results that are actually talking about that issue (it's just general load-time issues, mostly on mobile devices, from folks using the baked-assets approach).
Yeah, from that angle I think it would not be fixed without our specific upload. However, my assumption -- perhaps wrong -- is that the load time is indicative of some other underlying issue. Something related to multithreading or some other issue, perhaps. So in fixing something "unrelated," they might fix our issue.
But with all the new textbox funkiness and so forth, that provides yet more disincentive to try to upgrade, since who knows what all more is there, and if it will be something we can fix on our end, and how long that might take, etc. As you know.
Right, I think we're going to need to make our own textbox unless that "new GUI" thing ever materializes. It's just getting worse with time 
That is... fairly untenable. I've done it before, in raw C# GDI+. A single-line textbox is only so bad, but multi-line is a nightmare. The big parts are the text-entry cursor position, handling wrapping, clicking to a specific part of the text, and scrolling. A lot of games just do a "there is no mouse support, it just types what you press and you can use backspace to erase from the end of the text. That works for games without much in the way of textboxes, and no multiline textboxes at all, but wouldn't do it for us.
So doing our own thing would be a big win if we could do it right, obviously, but I estimate at least a solid week of work from one of us, if not more. Blargh.
So, yeah. Unity 3D is still my favorite engine by a huge margin, but nothing is perfect. I curse it far less than I would curse any other game engine I've ever seen.
Haha, yea, it'd be funny to have them put up a testimonial like "When our company switched to Unity3D, we experienced a 40% drop in the number of times a programmer had to be escorted from the building for excessive swearing!"
Hahahaha.
