I don't have near the time wait you are axperiencing in opening the SDT explorer. Do you have SDT installed on your local drive? I am thinking you may have to rethink how you are doing all those changes to the database. Tables, file structures and indexes should be fairly stable after a reasonable period of time. If your other developers are using SDT to make these changes, you need to purchase a SDT license for each.

I suspect SDT explorer is slow instanciating because it is having to run through validation from all the changes made to the DB outside of SDT. If you use SDT to make changes to your tables, indexes, views, etc., startup should be faster.

In your automatation of rebuilding indexes, etc., did you build in the recreation of PK, FK, persistent relations as well? How do you handle DB updates to your customers? My SDT license has more than paid for itself in saved time in all these areas.

Having 10 additional metat data files is nothing to me. I just bundle them up in a zip file with the DBC, DCX and DCT files and download them to my customers. My app will detect this file, use DynaZip to unzip it to the database folder, then run the SDT database validation procedure. No fuss, no muss.