Huh, I'm not sure why you say it takes "hours", it takes about 15 minutes for me to download it on a 50Mbps and that's not exactly fast.

When you get a new machine, at most you'll be one or two point updates down, and you can just use a combo updater, again, about 15 minutes to download, another 15 minutes to update.

Every one has their own dotfiles set up but I have a script that pulls my dotfiles, installs every package in a Brewfile, and while that's going on, I can set up my mail by just switching on iCloud in System Preferences.

So for me, when someone says it takes days, I don't know what to tell them. You must have really slow download speeds for it to take days. I can get started in a day, less than 4 hours total to get set up. 'days' is a BIG overstatement.