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I don't think the issue with the armory is related to the number of files required to view the page for a few reasons:
1) Armory scrapers don't download those files.
2) A browser will download the files once, and consequent requests will use the cache (as explained in the post above).
3) Simple file requests don't put much strain on a server.
4) XSLT transformations are actually performed by your browser. The only time the XSLT transform is done by blizzard is when you view the web page with a browser that doesn't support such transformations.
The bulk of any cause of slowdown would be when the blizzard site has to access it's database backend to retrieve that data, and (to a much lesser extent) the time it takes to transform that data into meaningful XML. With so many characters/items/guilds stored, it would be very difficult for Blizzard to cache any information, and as such each request would require a hit to the database to retrieve the necessary information. I would put money on the bottleneck existing here.
Bottlenecks could also appear from inefficient data queries or code. They tend to get magnified by a very large amount when you are servicing so many requests at once.
There are a number of architectural improvements that you can make to improve such speeds, but most of the time it involves having a number databases servicing requests to spread the load. It's also common to spend time optimising data queries and the data itself to speed up requests.
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