I share the OP’s sentiment. I suspect the loading stage of the sim hasn’t received much attention from the developers so far, or at least hasn’t experienced much improvement in terms of duration, even though they have acknowledged the issue. After all it took months for the developers to realize that many of us users were experiencing the “Press any key” as an issue because they were jumping straight into the game in their daily work routine.
I can imagine that during the loading stage the sim calls home, authenticates and looks for updates (a step that varies enormously when you compare how different scenery updaters deal with this matter). In this respect I am willing to exert some patience as I am grateful that dealing with keys due to SASL inconsistencies has finally become a thing of the past. However, what about the rest? Why would the game have to go through the entire list of contents in the internal and community folders, if it does at all, at a point where it has yet to determine where I plan to fly, other than for the purpose of displaying pretty tags in the world map? Liveries, weather, maps… couldn’t all that be loaded at a later stage, as they become required? I would definitely love to have a glimpse at what is going on behind the scenes during the loading stage.