[tweakimp]

In the near future we will use lazy imports :) https://peps.python.org/pep-0810/

[theLiminator]

This can't come soon enough. Python is great for CLIs until you build something complex and a simple --help takes seconds. It's not something easily worked around without making your code very ugly.

[peterfirefly]

It's not that hard to handle --help and --version separately before importing anything.