For me, it's never taken that long, five minutes top from launch to play. Now once I updated to 1.66, it's ten minutes from launch to save game screen, then another indeterminable amount of time between that and actual play. But I'm sure that's another EAxian feature.

With nothing but awesome and aweconf in my mods folder, my game (newly updated to 1.66) takes a good ten minute to load. Is awesome not compatible with 1.66? Forgive my inevitable idiocy.