That’s pretty strange.
When I’m hosting events for the Arizona Audio Video Club, I bring an inexpensive travel router that I connect to the Internet via USB-tethering to my smartphone. To the 1 Gbps LAN ports, I connect a tiny Roon Server and a network audio bridge (Raspberry Pi, iFi ZEN Stream, or similar). I have nearly 2,000 albums in FLAC and DSF format on an internal microSD card or USB-attached HDD, but we mostly stream from Qobuz.
For control, I have Roon apps installed on a couple of tablets and my laptop. Our Member Listening Night sessions typically run several hours. Even with this minimally spec’ed network and system with a less than perfect Internet connection, the Roon UI has been immediately responsive on all control surfaces for all of these events so far. Hoping this trend of success continues since I’m bring the same setup to an event later this month!
I realize that those who are experiencing problems with their Roon setups find anecdotes like these frustrating. I encourage them to take heart as these suggest that it is, in fact, possible to make Roon work flawlessly. Keep working at it.