I've been using Bayden SlickRun on windows for
years. It's near-instant, though it doesn't have support for external applications such as sessions. Otoh, I can easily launch putty and Firefox sessions with cli switches; I'd imagine to filezilla has similar. Discovery isn't an issue for me--I know what my profile are called, as I intentionally gave them short, memorable names.
I've moved on somewhat to using jumplists instead for common programs. Some programs don't support jumplists still, either because they're too old or the developers just don't care; for programs like Hyper-V manager, you can use Jumplist Launcher to create a jumplist for it by manually entering the command lines for the main program and each jumplist entry.
