Thoughts on best way to improve the weight
Instead of concentrating on weight loss, why not make it easier to ride in a different kind of way?
As above if you change components and focus on the grams you will end up with a horrible clothes horse of a bike that may be light but it will also be unbalanced. If you’re happy with the geometry and feel of your Intense, have a close look at the things that make it draggy – basically the drivetrain as well as the wheels/tyres and to some extent the brakes.
I went through this exercise in 2012 with my Scott Voltage FR. It’s an animal and in standard form it weighs a ton. I tried swapping the wheels and forks for lighter items and although the bike was lighter it felt awful. Purely by chance I fitted a lighter chainring and a superlight KMC chain and immediately although the bike wasn’t that much lighter it felt a whole lot easier to pedal. I followed this with cranks, BB, wheels (similar weight to the originals but better hubs), tyres, tubes, cassette and pedals and the difference was amazing – maybe a kg or two off the total weight but so much easier to ride. The final piece of the jigsaw was the brakes – there was nothing obviously wrong with the std Elixirs but some new Shimanos made sure there was absolutely nothing dragging
What have now is a bike that isn’t that much lighter than std but is really easy to pedal and still feels really stiff and solid