Hi Krazo, it should never take 15 minutes to complete, I have a mission with 3000 ALiVE placed AI, about 300 editor placed units and objects, around 30 scripts running and pretty much all of the ALiVE modules placed; all of that takes around 2 minutes to load. :/ Anyway, the majority of loading time is caused by module initialisation, so it's almost certainly that. Are you using mission persistence?

As for your idea, yup, very possible. Place a TAOR marker over each corner you want a faction in, and the main part simply blacklist all of the corner TAOR markers :) But like Rath said, getting civilians to fight isn't too easy.