I did some more testing today. I removed all the Halion 6 and Halion Sonic SE plugins from the VST folder so that the projects would load with "missing" plugin instances to see if these plugins were causing all of the problems of slower loading and closing compared to VE PRO 6.
The load tmes definitely improved a bit but still overall the load times were much longer than VE PRO 6 ewith those plugins. Although Steinberg may have a bit of work on their end I am definitely seeing VE PRO 7 with load.close and export times that are vastly longer than VE PRO 7 and am surprised that all Cubase 10 users are not seeing what I am seeing.
To me VE PRO 7 is not useable....extremely disappointed that no one else is chiming in if they are having issues. I wish Vienna would engage in this conversation as I am spending a lot of time testing their product and am getting no where.