I’ve spent a lot of time trying to figure this one out, where the load average never drops, and thus the loading screen never goes away.
It’s been very frustrating because it’s been an intermittent issue. I’ll experience it, try to figure it out, end up reflashing the SD card and then I can’t reproduce it. It’s all the same hardware, including the SD card, and the same image that I’m flashing as well. I don’t know if something is getting sometimes getting corrupted on first boot or what.
As crazy as it seems, just reflashing the v1.4 image is pretty likely to work. I wish I could explain why because it really doesn’t make sense to me.
In my experience and from others on the forum here, using a faster SD card does seem to help with this problem, but it doesn’t solve it (obviously).
If you want to go back to v1.2, you might be able to get the OpenHAB addons working by making the configuration change mentioned here.