Questions about Skuid Platform vs Skuid on Salesforce and request for help

Hello:  after 4 very long and expensive years in a Salesforce contract, I am exploring other options.  Skuid on Salesforce literally saved our business as mortgage and financial Fund applications are too hard to do with normal Salesforce.  However, I am so very tired of how long it takes to load skuid on Salesforce (especially complex pages) and I noticed that it is way faster on Skuid Platform.  Not being a real actual developer with today’s technologies and no knowledge of today’s databases (I was a programmer on mainframes for many years a long time ago), I am wondering the following:
1) Could I keep Salesforce with just a few regular licenses and access everything else on Salesforce from the Skuid Platform until I had time to build out our databases somewhere else? And would the pages load as slowly, or is it faster?
2) If I were to choose some type of database somewhere, what would be the most recommended for the 100 or so custom objects that we have?
3) Are there any gurus in the community who works as consultants or does Skuid do this time of work so I could hire someone to mentor me so I could get this done before our Salesforce contract renews?  I probably need about a day and then probably an hour a day for the next 30 days.  I would like to convert our 5 Salesforce custom apps into something that worked faster, but yet kept most of the features of Salesforce (security, etc.)?  Has anyone already done this?  I need the fast route, as I work two other full time jobs and I get to build our apps in the remaining 4 hours of the day.  And our apps are in production.  And unfortunately, everytime I have asked a consultant if they know Skuid, they say “WHAT?” And I say “the best thing that ever happened to Salesforce is Skuid, I’m surprised you aren’t using it.” So I need a guru and I am willing to pay for the assistance.  The most important thing is for us to speed up the pages, as it always takes 16-34 seconds to load.