Have the logback developers ever considered allowing Joran to be configured to a less advanced mode or providing a different engine for parsing logback XML config files? Specifically in our application the startup time is very important, and we spend over a second at startup waiting for slf4j to be configured with logback. Timing reveals that almost all the time is inside PropertySetter.introspect(). We are not using any advanced features of joran like custom rules, so we don't really need the overhead of reflection. It should be possible to configure logback with XML files and avoid reflection since we are only using types/interfaces known to logback such as Appender, Encoder, TriggeringPolicy, etc. Could Joran provide a no reflection mode or logback provide an alternate way of parsing XML files?