Nelder–Mead has often not worked well for me in moderate to high dimensions. I'd recommend trying Powell's method if you want to quickly converge to a local optimum. If you're using scipy's wrappers, it's easy to swap between the two:
https://docs.scipy.org/doc/scipy/reference/optimize.html#loc...
For nastier optimization problems there are lots of other options, including evolutionary algorithms and Bayesian optimization: