[mc] mc slow start after upgrade from 4.8.22 to 4.8.29

[mi]

I mean, we are talking about 100 vs 250 ms here ... 400thecat, if that's really a problem for you then you might consider Yuris suggestion, to work with parallel instances. Just fire up a few instances  in a terminal with multiple pts tabs. There are terminals (and window managers) which save the state and where you can configure commands for startup. (I used Roxterm in the past, but it's kind of gone from Debian now. Now using tilix.)
Alternatively you could explicitely add an X / Desktop startup script which explicitely opens the terminal with several tabs.
If you are a console freak you could launch mc from a login script like .profile.

On the other hand, it was an interesting question and we learned something about mc again. So please don't mind.