its not that it takes a minute. its the fact that loading it takes more and more time for no aparent reason. I was loading the same model, it wasn't higher quallity. Look at the timings. it takes 20 ms loading the materials the first time, over a minute the second and over 2 minutes the 3rd time. I tried using material preset and it does the same thing. it hangs for minutes at end for no apparent reason. if i just go and load a character asset made by someone else it takes like 30-1 minute regardless of how many characters there are in the scene.
That is a really interesting observation, I missed it in your first post.
The fact you were reloading the same character and got wildly different times.... clearly there is no "oh I already have asset YYY's materials in memory, i'll just copy them..." code.
One difference is the first character had " Finished asset load (open) " and the others had " Finished asset load (merge) ". Open and Merge may behave differently?
I wonder if Daz is doing some very dodgy linked-list memory allocation thing. I have noticed that after loading a lot of stuff, it takes nearly as long as it did to load the scene when you try to fully QUIT daz (the UI goes away but there is a still a process running that is holding the memory and verrrrrrry slowly reducing the memory).
The sad thing is there is literally nothing we can do about it: the Daz developers are few in number, labouring under a massively complex c++ legacy code base, and the company is not particularly profitable. I recall hearing that they were bought out by an investor not long ago, but no real change in their product so far...