Right now, we're loading the page with results from the backend as-is (whatever defaults are in the wiki/user) and if there's a saved query, we reload the page again with the saved query filtering.

This shouldn't be necessary. We should check in the backend whether a saved query exists as default, and if it does, load the initial results based on that saved query.
Then, we can remove the click-block on the result lists as the system loads. We will still have a load time for the RCFilter interface, but at least the result list itself will be available while the user is waiting.