I have been having relatively good luck with the boards since the 2.2 release. Last week in between beta testing when I jumped back into 2.1.5, the timeouts for the mission board were ridiculous!
2.2 seemed to have resolved that for me so far, but I wouldn't be surprised if I encounter delays again down the road. This has been an issue with this game for literally years now! Why Frontier can't maintain a reliable interface between the player and the mission board server is something I just don't understand. As you stated, the Commodity boards always seem to pop up just fine, so why not the mission boards?
Since I am currently not experiencing this myself, I am starting to wonder if this comes down to some kind of regional issue? I have no idea how FD manages their game servers and how these procedurally generated missions are delivered to us the players, but it does seem to be an issue that often only effects specific areas of the planet while other regions are fine and vice versa.
