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Aw shucks. Thanks Simon!

You know I'd love if decals could be a bump map, which would render these a bit better, and be handy to represent textures. I had to just make a believable-ish shaded thread image.

Oh, in my case I couldn't break up my model even if I wanted to. My main chassis was all one piece of sheetmetal 6 feet tall and 3 feet wide with hundreds of holes in it for PEM fasteners, rivets, etc.

I've found sheetmetal to be slow as molasses on a few projects I worked on. Disappointing for sure. Creo would hardly ever bog down on anything. Maybe it is that parasolid kernal, I have no idea. I know Creo uses its own kernal from the late 80's I guess. What I did that helped a lot was "finish" the sheetmetal model immediately after the main shape with bends was all finished. Then, put the holes/slots/etc afterwards. This removes them from the flat pattern and speeds regeneration. I found the vendors don't want a flat pattern anyway, they unfold the step model in their own software. Also now, hobby places like sendcutsend accept step files (before they only accepted flat pattern dxf).

That's awesome.

I shall be encouraging my students to use this.

Once again, @EvanReese creates a custom feature that should be a standard part of Onshape.

Yeah the trick is finding the right balance.

Top down design with layout sketches derived into multiple part studios is going to be the most efficient in terms of regen times but just making the mating parts in a single part studio is the easiest/quickest (until it gets too slow to regen).

Deriving active sheet metal parts now at least allows starting with everything in a part studio and "parting it out" at a later point to add details as a mitigation strategy.

Without seeing the actual model it's hard to tell. Perhaps the holes may be trying to check the scope between a bunch of parts. If you explicitly tell the hole feature to only intersect the part(s) you want, does that help?

I've run into this quite a bit…
My plan for the next project is to make use of the "derive" feature for active sheet metal parts. Create only the key "shared" geometry of your parts in a part studio and then "finish" the parts in their own part studio after deriving them in.