Since I don’t recall it being mentioned anywhere as an update, it’s pleasing to see that the load time issues appear to have been resolved. At a guess, it seems like the game now caches the new UI shaders instead of compiling them from scratch every time. Very possibly talking out of my backside here though.
Anyway as a result of whatever has changed, loading the game after a normal Windows startup is far quicker than before, and more in line with how it was in 2021 and earlier. After a full restart of the PC, the loading time is a lot longer (in percentage terms), and similar to what I first considered to be slow and complained about. That’s what makes me think it’s a caching thing.
So thanks for this, it’s far better.