I only had the really long shut down the first time. It now only takes about 15 seconds. In fact, before I rebuilt my SD card from scratch, It usually took about 45-50 seconds to fully boot with metadata. Now it's taking around 25 seconds. So my splash screen video I'm using now takes longer to fully play than the system does to load up. Still, I think even a simple progress bar on the "EmulationStation Loading" screen would be a nice thing to have. But something like that is going to require more than displaying a simple static splash screen.