As a comparison, Salt checks the users, groups, ssh keys, etc. in under 1 second. Ansible to do the same set of actions was taking nearly 2 minutes. This was just to check, not even to take action.

So, yeah, the majority of time in an initial run is waiting on apt/yum, when nothing is changing the majority of the time is spent on checking things.

When you're making config management a part of your application's deployment process, waiting on checking is painful. This would have added 2 minutes to deployment time. When we doubled the number of users managed it would add 4. That's a really, really long time.