Thanks all @Tony.Nguyen @owen.campbell @divyeshlakhotia @stefano.menci for sharing the advice and lessons learned.
Regarding startup speed - I’ll try out the suggestions above and report back what worked for us!
In the case for Monorepo vs Dependencies I’ll stick with the monorepo for now mainly - for the simplicity in managing different versions etc. And until hopefully this request Depend on a specific Branch of a Dependency is implemented.
Thanks all and a great weekend to you!
Mark