the node syncing is fairly slow vs. many other coins - is that mostly to do with the low amount of nodes in the network? it’s not saturating cpu, network or disk

yeah, most likely because there is no look ahead

it doesn't request the next block until it validates and saves the block before it

which is good for the general keeping up with the network phase and not wasting bandwidth on nonsense

but for a quick catchup, it is dominated by network latency