Sim Update 5 loaded the quickest for me I would say under a minute. Sim Update 7, I think is getting on for 3 minutes. It doesn’t help by sitting on the checking for updates page for 30 seconds before continuing. It can’t even complain about disk access speed because most of the 3 minutes there is little to no disk access.
You can make sure that AV is disabled or at the very least excluding the MSFS folders.
There is a fair bit of network traffic when its loading, not in volume so faster internet doesn’t help but lots in terms of individual requests.
I think more than 30s from an ssd is a bit unacceptable these days especially as at the end of it all its really done is load a menu. You load a flight and its another 90 seconds before you get in the plane.
Its like having a tape drive 8 bit micro all over again.