Is there a way to speed up the loading of Borderlands 2 in Winlator?

So I've had a hankering to play Borderlands 2 again and I've encountered a couple of issues on my Retroid Pocket 6 12GB.

In Eden the game would crash after the first save point, going onto the Southern Shelf, but that was fixed by using an older driver.

However ideally I'd like to play the PC version, mainly because I'm used to an Xbox style button layout, but while the game plays fine it takes an absolute age to actually load. The initial splash screen can take over five minutes to get past and then the checking DLC screen before the main menu loads takes an equal amount of time.

These loading times occur in CMOD, glibcmod, and Ludashi. Is there a fork that loads the game faster? Am I missing some setting that I can change to speed things up? Even moving the game to the container's internal storage doesn't do a thing.

So is there something I'm missing here or should I just resign myself to playing the Switch version and accidentally going back when I meant to select something in the menu?