Understanding how much data it might be potentially requesting, I’d even accept a “please wait while we load this community” screen that then redirects to the community once its been loaded onto your instance

This would be closer to my and others expectations on how a web link should work.

Yeah, that would work as well. I'm sure there are times when there isn't a community that someone made such a link to, and at those times it should show an error screen, obviously.