I'm not saying that slow installs are good or bad, and as you point out, there are sometimes good reasons for making installs faster. (Although for VMs, a lot

I'm not saying that slow installs are good or bad, and as you point out, there are sometimes good reasons for making installs faster. (Although for VMs, a lot of people use docker or premade VM images just for this reason) In another interesting case I've run into in the past, the installation of World of Warcraft is insanely good and had a lot of effort put into it (a little bit by me, even). This was important as being able to start the game as soon as possible, even before you've downloaded the entire thing, is a way to actually increase conversion to paid users (or really, to not take so long that a person goes off and does something else and forgets to play WoW). This is one reason why there's an incremental install process for Blizzard games that involves a lot more tricks than most people realize.