What I noticed is it's a lot faster when you open it, but now then synchronizing.
Even though the verification is improved, quality of your connected peers, internet speed and HDD speed remained unchanged. These could cause a bottleneck.
If I had to choose, what would be better, more ram, an SSD, a better CPU? what's the priority here?
I've got an old quadcore, a regular 7200 RPM hard drive, and 4 gigs of ram.
When you upgrade, SSD should be your priority in order to run Core faster, as far as I can see from syncing speed feedbacks.