With a SSD and plenty of RAM load-times are a non-issue for the most part. I often leave applications I use frequently (or even infrequently) open for weeks at

With a SSD and plenty of RAM load-times are a non-issue for the most part. I often leave applications I use frequently (or even infrequently) open for weeks at a time. There's not much downside in doing this besides some extra clutter in your dock/taskbar. For any fairly modern machine an upgrade to SSD + 8GB of RAM will mostly solve the problem. That's about $250-$300 to avoid the problem almost entirely. I feel like this is a byproduct of the race to the bottom of PCs over the last 5 years or so. Just because you can buy a $500 computer with a spinning disk and 2GB of RAM doesn't mean you should buy it. There are trade-offs to consider. Developers also have these trade-offs to consider. How much money can a developer justify spending to optimize load-times when there is an easy and relatively inexpensive fix available to all consumers? If they deliver 10 second load times on an average PC that is acceptable enough. If a user wants 2 second load-times they can buy a better computer. It's always been the case with PCs that your results vary depending on the hardware you purchase.