One other thing to keep in mind: if you dislike splash screens but don't have an SSD, then you have already placed a maximum dollar value on how much you care about your applications' loading time.
Exactly right. The splash screen is there only to show what it's doing while loading all the libraries and parsing setting files. If this guy/girl really hated the photoshop startup screen, he should do two things:
1. Get a better harddrive setup for his business.
2. Have photoshop start automatically after boot.
A quick timed test on two striped SSD's: Photoshop starts up in 4 seconds from click to ready. Blender takes about 1.5 second.
