Okay, that’s strange. When you say workstations, I assume that you had pretty decent hardware and probably more powerful than my consumer notebook. I usually don’t notice lags or load times > 1 second. If I do a complex operation like mass-cloning an object via a polar pattern, I have to wait for 2 or 3 seconds but really nothing that bothered me in the workflow. Definitely never anything close to a minute as you described.
If you want to give FreeCAD another chance one day and still experience the same issues, maybe bring it up in the official forums. The experts there might have an idea what could be wrong.
Next: People allergic to fast acceleration and high velocity and climate crisis would be mostly resolved.