Sorry to hear about this problem rearing its head again and I completely understand your frustration. I wish we had better solutions for your today. We are working on smashing this bug, speeding up boot times, and developing another model of hardware that will boot within seconds, but they’re not done yet.
For anyone else who might see this thread, know that we are planning on completely rewriting the image from scratch to remove OpenHAB (discussion thread on that). That is likely the component that is keeping the load average high, and thus keeping the loading screen from going away.
The new image will boot faster, and still won’t require batteries. The screen brightness is a function of the hardware, but a community member contributed a screen dimmer. We’re also working on a new model (Hestia32) which will have a screen where the backlight can be turned off.
In the meantime, for people who are comfortable SSHing into their pi, or mounting the SD card and editing file that way, this can be fixed by editing /home/pi/scripts/kiosk-xinit.sh to not wait until the load average is under 2.00. This is a matter of changing the “2.00” to something larger, like “5.00” or “10.00”.
To be clear, that change is just a workaround. Reflashing the SD card will fix the problem. Neither of these are acceptable, and as I said, we’re working on an entirely new image which avoids this problem all together.