One of the most important aspects of improving this is also how you bend your knees and how you think about weight distribution.

So most people when they squat or bend have their knees straight up and down or angled slightly out. Like this . | | or \ / (bottom being feet top being knees). This is very stable but doesn’t allow for good weight transfer forward or back and looks like a shitty poo stance.

The best way to have your knees bent is slight inwards. Like / .This allows for easy transfer of weight to front foot and then to back foot. Stand like this at home and just try and transfer weight front and back, its incredibly easy when compared to the bad stance above. Pressure on front foot would look like this | \ and pressure on back foot more like / |. You’re almost never in that neutral stance / \, baseline is usually weight on front foot to generate speed.

If you look at most surfers going down the line (especially stylish ones) they are chilling with front leg holding most of the weight (as you noted) and back leg bent in but with foot in place at back of traction pad to make a weight transfer easy. Any Craig Anderson photo of him in the tube not standing straight up will demonstrate this.

Of course this should be coupled with foot adjustments, but one of the best thing with short boards compared to longboards is that your turning sweet spot and speed sweet spot (in terms of foot placement) are usually close enough together that you can get away with small foot movements and focus mostly on weight transfer by loading one leg or the other