IonicJS very slow performance with many ion-slide-box controls

I'm creating a simple app that lists users in a table and let's them swipe left or right on their icon to sign in or out.

I'm using the ion-slide-box control for this, but it is very slow to render initially.

On an iPad this performance problem makes the initial load time 10+ seconds.

It seems some of the problem is that $digest is being called every time an item is added, rather than after all the items in ng-repeat are finished.

A simple JS fiddle showing the performance problem:

http://jsfiddle.net/556GL/38/

I've even tried playing with the ionic source code directly to remove extra calls that triggered $digest to try to defer it, to no avail.

    callback: function(slideIndex) {
      $scope.currentSlide = slideIndex;
      $scope.onSlideChanged({ index: $scope.currentSlide, $index: 

$scope.currentSlide});
          $scope.$parent.$broadcast('slideBox.slideChanged', slideIndex);
          $scope.activeSlide = slideIndex;
          // Try to trigger a digest
          //$timeout(function() {});  // commented this out
        }

The loading time seems to scale with more items, OR more ion-slides in the template.

I'm looking any possible solution to improve the rendering time!