Hello Michael,
Yes, of course in a shared development environment, the Activation process has to be tailored.
However, I am alone on it. And even Activating a simple XBO with a Before-Save and a validation OnSave takes too long to my taste. 
Actually, the worst thing for me is the repository explorer, because I use it a lot. Each time I switch of BO, it takes several seconds (almost 30s if not a minute) to display the corresponding doc. Even if I only switch field in the same BO.
But Ludger and Horst are right, performance is really depending on the tenant I am working on.
Some are slow as hell, other are quick enough that it does not bother me. And I also made some testing in the Cloud Solution to make sure it was related to tenants. And a tenant which is slow in the SDK is slow in the Cloud Solution, and vice versa.
Now the question is: why is this so random?
Because this is hard to believe that for the same product and the same licensing price, customers get different performance on tenants!
I hope this back end performance is not on SAP side, because it would be a big flaw in the pricing. Like you pay the same as you competitor but your system does not run as well.
PS: Horst Schaude, when you say contact the hosting guy, what do you mean by that? How can we know who is hosting Bydesign for our customers?
I thought every Bydesign system was hosted by SAP Germany through sub contracting, so we cannot know who is sub contracted by SAP.
Besides, I thought ByDesign was hosted at SAP Germany until the future data centers for HANA DB are deployed (I think only Germany, Philie and Shanghai are deployed for now, Canada is scheduled for December if I am not mistaking).
Than you all for your attention.
Best regards.
Jacques-Antoine