Is it possible to delay the loading of sub-objects?

I have an object (stored in a .uasset) with an array of actor instances - sort of a database. When the object is loaded all the actors it contains are loaded too, then all their components, materials, textures and so on are loaded, which makes the editor hang. But in fact I don’t need all those actors from the start, I maybe will need to load some of them later.

Is there a way to say: “don’t load actors in this array until explicitly asked”?

You can use things like TSoftObjectPtr for this, it will not load the objects until you manually request them.