I set up a 2025-03 development environment and checked out the 2.17.0-RELEASE tag. When launching an OSATE runtime instance, it took about 2 minutes before the splash screen appeared on an Apple M3.
Debugging the OSGi resolver showed that it was thrashing on a uses-constraint conflict between org.hamcrest and org.hamcrest.library, which are both included in the target platform. Since Hamcrest is not required in my runtime instance, I commented out the hamcrest entries in the OSATE2 launch configuration
here. This resolved the startup delay.
I’m providing this feedback for others who may encounter similar issues.