Maybe the acceptability of the experience depends on one's downloading and cataloguing habits. At the end of each day of a photoshoot I download my card(s) to specially created folders on my hard-drive structured as subject main folder, then daily date/place per nested folder. Once they are downloaded in their correct permanent folder structure, which happens quickly, then I open Lr and import them folder by folder, creating separate similarly named collections per folder along the way. In this manner, there is no confusion between adding or not adding. The import process happens quickly; building Standard Previews take a bit longer, but that's OK. Once the photos are thereby sorted into their collections, I can then leisurely move through them collection by collection prune what gets removed from the collection, or removed from the catalog or trashed, and do my selects. This sequence allows for closer inspection as needed to make these decisions, rather than what one gets at the pre-import stage, and so far, the speed of each process is acceptable - at least to me.