Pymel.core import in Maya 2018 super slow

Greetings, was there ever a consensus on the root issue? I’m sure like many of you, I use PyMel on the regular. Does anyone have a good workaround to the recent changes in Maya causing PyMel to exhibit “slower” import performance? Would an executeDefferred call to import pymel.core suffice, after the plugins are initialized and registered? I’m assuming userSetup.py wont be a good place for this as the UI and plugins have not been fully registered yet.