I'd blame the client, then. The processing that the system and the game would be doing is identical - interpreting lots of strings, parsing through it. The values aren't stored in a form other than a line in a file, so there's actually no in-game efficiency advantage other than leveraging the power of the game server to do the processing rather than a client which may do a poorer job.
Well... why?
If it was put into another file as power is being added (into two instead of one, with one just having a line added to it and the second looking for a name, adding the power total to it with 2 for scholars and bards), every time you looked at the summary it would still just be looking at the lines in a file. Sure, there's more little processing done every time power is added, but you
have to be doing something similar with the listofferings. Listofferings Summary sure doesn't take 10 seconds to build up a log from the last 3 years worth of offerings. It would take far more than that with
any client / computer combination readily available to your playerbase.
Especially since you're not even considering the little bit of lag time in between receiving the "more?" and sending "more" to the server, which adds up to a massive amount of time on these huge logs.
Someone who understands heh