Sigh... we are going in circles. You like the slow boot. You like suspending things, I'm against it. I'd rather not elaborate, because you will like the opposite of it, no matter what.
No, we are not. It's not a matter of slow vs. fast. It's a matter of resilient vs. fragile.
I prefer to have a resilient system in most cases, regardless of the form factor. If I was preparing an image for an embedded system, I'd go speed all the way down, within the limits of pragmatism.
I work in high performance computing. Speed is what we need, what we engineer for. However, resiliency is an equally important and valid concern. So, if I'm losing 5 seconds once a month (or once three-four months in case of desktop systems), that's a perfectly acceptable trade-off for a resilient system.
When a system tests its memory for 30 seconds, and initializes the motherboard and other devices for 3 minutes, losing 3 seconds on a bloody RAID speed test doesn't matter.
Oh, one of the latest servers we have exposes its management interface as a LAN port over USB, as I found out yesterday.
Everything is fine...