Hi LDodds,
Packaging a project, especially one with a lot of content can be very time consuming. That also depends on your system specs. Even with a higher end computer packaging can still be time consuming though.
If you’ve not already, you may want to read through this page in the documentation: Packaging Unreal Engine Projects | Unreal Engine 5.1 Documentation
Some takeaways would be to make sure that you only package the maps that you want to include. This will only use content that is available in those maps rather than packaging all content. You can also set the option for Create compressed cooked packages to reduce the package size, but not necessarily the time it takes to complete.
Thank you!
Tim