Adobe Premiere Pro CC 14.4 Overall Slow Performance

I am experiencing extremely frustrating, slow performance all across the board with the recent updates of Premiere Pro

Latest Premiere Pro : 14.4.

MacOS : 10.15.5

Macbook Pro 16Gb RAM

Quad Core 3.1GHz, Intel i7

Sometimes Premier will crash the O/S, and cause a segfault.  (Which is not a surprise, given the  memory management issues)

Adobe support - please help??

Before the recent updates, Premiere Pro would load up fast, and perform really fast, for any timeline interaction. 

I am rendering 1080p timelines, with the majority of 1080p footage, and occasional 4k clips.  However, no crazy transitions, or rendering artifacts.  

On Startup :

1. seems to be caching EVERYTHING in EVERY TIMELINE - and while building this cache, it exceeds the Memory Allocation too

2. Does NOT respect the Memory Preferences setting, but consumes ALL AVAILABLE SYSTEM RAM (16Gb), forces the O/S into swapping to disk, which ultimately brings the O/S to a crawl.

3. Consumes ALL AVAILABLE SYSTEM CPU.

4. So essentially the Preferences -> Memory setting is IGNORED.

A Adobe Support call has been unable to provide any useful insights.

I performed the following steps already

1. uninstalled

2. re-installed the Application

3. purged my ~Documents/Adobe folders, (and essentially starting with a fresh), also getting rid of any unwanted Custom presets

4. Cleared Preview cache, and file caches

5. tried a test project to contain only ONE timeline sequencem with a few clips - and the problems remain.

Still the same results.

Not only does it hang up to minutes to open a project, anything todo with timeline scrubbing, adding/removing clips (drag/drop) clips to the timeline, takes forever.  Cursor stops moving, and just overall poor system performance.

Timeline /Preview Playback  (1080p ) stalls...on playing - and takes forever to respond to the "play/stop" instructions.  Sometimes the lag is so long, it mis-interprets instructions, well longer than 10 secs after issueing the command.   It's just unworkable.

My Workspace has these panels open.  An honestly I need them open all the time, for the product to be functional - it's a key part of my workflow.

1. Essential Graphics

2. Lumetri color

3. Effects browser

Essentially the product is USELESS at this time.

Oh - and Premiere Pro and associated CEPH processes will consume all available CPU (in my case up to 700%) according to the system monitor.  (Quad core)  

Here's a hint perhaps?

My typical application start process is : 

1.  Double click on a project file.

What does seem to provide a bit of startup performance increase is.

1.  Start Premiere from the App Browser - and DO NOT OPEN ANY PROJECT.   

2. Leave it for 5 mins to do it's thing.

3.  Then Load A project - and go from there. (and then it will do the same, try and cache everything, and go into all the spikes of CPU and RAM), after which it still accrued 14GB of RAM, despite my setting of 12GB to the application.