It does affect how i play the game, tbh. I find myself avoiding Defiance bay and Caed Nua as much as possible. I even use console commands to port around sometimes in order to avoid a half dozen loading screens getting from point A to point B, which I hate doing.
For example, when "learning" the Adra dragon fight, I wanted to go from her lair to the Dracogen Inn, then camp outside town, then the brothel, then back to her lair. The loading screens were comical.
I tried disabling autosave via iemod, which helped some. Perhaps it will become more noticeable as I progress in the game.