Unreal taking a long time to open a project

It might change your entire workflow but could be worth it in the end. I started using level streaming recently as I too have been building a lot in my project level. Using level streaming volumes in conjuction has improved performance with all these levels streaming seamlessly and great in the editor as well. If you break up your entire level into sub levels you can just load that specific sublevel and saving you loads of time waiting on the level to load fully.