After timing things, I believe the projects load in a reasonable amount of time. The issue is the intermittent Media Pending pauses which I’m unable to replicate currently (no doubt when the systems will be needed to something time-sensitive it will resume). The projects that were previously used are approaching half a gig in size, again, all stored locally. The projects that I am working on getting the editors to use are less than 100MB.
Any other ideas towards the Media Pending issue would be helpful.