Hey Media Encoder...why so slow?

How much slower is it than launching Premiere or After Effects? It does take a long time, but it's not that much slower (if at all) for me than the others. Multiple processors and gobs of RAM likely aren't going to help anyway with something like application startup time. If you open your Activity Monitor you wouldn't see either of those reporting high utilization.

The biggest thing contributing to launch times for the video and audio apps are loading plug-ins and initializing Mediacore, the media engine which contains all the format support. Audition used to startup lighting quick, but once Mediacore was hooked in (which was around the time Audition could work with Premiere project files), startup times dropped dramatically.