Using the -FastStart parameter shaved a further 14 sec or so.
Most of the time is still spent downloading things, so I believe the original request of this thread still stands - why is there a need to download 200MB of data from the Internet to get to the main menu? Could it be cached between runs?
On the 2mbit link that still takes around 15min to download… which is way better than 1h20min, but still somewhat annoyingly long.