I had a similar reaction. Everyone should applaud performance improvements, but gauge against the “speed of light”, not just a sloppy competitor. If you are measuring in seconds, you may have already anchored yourself incorrectly. Structure the UI so you can put locally cached media up just a few vblanks after the process launches. Structure the server so it can return everything necessary for the dynamic UI in one single query that was kicked off in parallel with the Gfx API initialization, branching to a modern transport protocol for large media files. You should be able to double click on the launcher and have it responsive before your muscle memory can slam the pointer to a location to click on.