I think everyone is at the same boat here bro.
Concerning the new tab ads you first asked about… as I addressed before, whenever a new tab Ad with low ptr is available to you it will prevent all others available new tab ads from being served until “pacing delivery” is complete.
You can check this ptr parameter for each campaign accessing the catalog directly: https://ads-static.brave.com/v9/catalog
I believe this ‘ptr’ should be an organic number between 0 and 1 based on the campaign feedback, but they’re forcing it to 0.01 or lower, which causes this behaviour. At this point I think it’s clearly intentional.
In practice, you will eventually see new tab Ads if dig further into new tab page and spend more time on it.