I dont agree with their programming approach.
They are trying to add all these bells and whistles to the javascript and DHTML, but what they forgot is that this GREATLY multiplies the bandwidth requirements of their platforms/webservers. Obviously they don't have the capability required to succesfully process these thousands of requests, especially when each user has to send requests so often to the webserver.
I get the impression that they were asking too much of "Can we do this" instead of "Should we do this"