It was almost instantaneous for me before december patch. 24 seconds seems much longer than I previously had.
Really? It seems, that we have to avoid closing the game in order to avoid long loading time 
It is very weird. It doesn’t even seem, like the game is loading or doing anything. It just sits for over a minute in task manager as a process taking ca 550 MB of RAM, seemingly idle. Then it suddenly starts to take more RAM and couple seconds later appears on task bar + intro starts playing.
I think, that this over a minute long idle time is certainly unnecessary and a bug.