Congrats on finally getting GWX. Sounds like you are really enjoying it.

The GWX team did a fantastic job on the expansion.
You mentioned long load times....
It is natural. There are soooooo many more units in GWX that the game has to load. When I first loaded a career after putting GWX2.0 on my computer, I thought something was wrong and thought that it crashed. It took about 15 minutes to load.

Thanks to this board, I found out that this was normal. My computer at the time was slow, so that didn't help. I did some upgrades and computer maintenance and that helped a bit but not much. With my new computer, I've cut the load time in half.
One suggestion, if you don't know it already, is to enable GWX-Lite Harbor(Harbour for you Brits

). It is supposed to help the load times. And make sure you don't have merged campaigns enabled-I bet that makes load times lonnnnnnnnng.
Enjoy the experience and keep us posted!