Very odd that you saw a marked reduction in build times using the extracted versions, did you clear the caches for each test? I just tested with a full set of MBS plugins on 2019r1.1 and:
Opening IDE - considerable reduction as I’d expect as it doesn’t have the overhead of working with compression
Zips - 0:39s
Extracted - 0:26s
Running 64bit new empty project - no noticeable difference
Zips: 2:57s
Extracted: 3:02s
The opening of the IDE and compiling the application were recognizably faster. This is what I meant by it being good if the IDE load time was your primary goal.
The longer timed even was after you’ve caused the “needs recompile” status to be set in the IDE because you modified something in the Plugins folder. That is where the processing time grew drastically. Granted, that should only occur when you first extract and reconfigure the plugins folder content, but I was running test after test and it was quite obvious that the “preparing plugins” segment was taking quite a hit.