Nobody has said games take longer to open if they're not on Steam. Ever in the history of the internet most likely. Objections to having to have ten different clients installed to play what you want are completely reasonable, when there's zero reason for it to be the case other than publisher greed and desperation for control. None of them are a viable alternative to Steam on the whole (in any sense, be it selection of products, community or infrastructure), so the argument that competition is good is a non-starter. They aren't competition. They're just an extra, unnecessary hoop to jump through in order to play certain games. I'd rather just play something else, and I do. The only EA game I've purchased since Origin came into being is Mass Effect 3 which, aside from being a massive pile of **** that did nothing to change my mind about avoiding EA, I bought on Xbox 360.
I'm slightly more sympathetic towards uPlay and the rest since they didn't actually drag their games off of Steam in order to prop up a service that nobody asked for, but they're still awful pieces of software that cause problems that simply wouldn't exist otherwise. Like when I went back to Assassin's Creed IV and found that my cloud saves were gone as they'd disabled them completely due to a bug. I subsequently never touched the game again. Needless to say, if they'd just used Steam Cloud, there'd have been no issue.
