I'm done with it for now. I'd seen someone mentioning it was slow, so I had a look. It doesn't look particularly slow here, but it might be because I'm on a SSD. We'll see what people think.
It took me about 7 min to refresh a wallet that was 100,000 blocks behind on a 2 TB HDD. So I can see why this could be an issue for someone to has an old HDD hard drive say about 200 GB since HDD seek time for a given spin rotation basically falls with size. I would expect about 70 min for a 200 GB HDD to refresh 100,000 blocks. Still I would not hold up 0.9 over this since there are simple fixes for a user.
1) Get an SSD or a large HDD.
2) Refresh the wallet on a regular basis rather than wait a few months as I just did.
Edit: OS Trisquel GNU/Linux 7, Processor Core 2 Quad 6600 @ 2.4 GHz (about 7 years old) RAM 8 GB DDR 2 Motherboard Asus P5N-D. Monero Version: 0.8.8.7-107eeaf