The entmake will probably be faster. But the reason you see hatch slowing everything down is due to it sarting off as a pick point hatch - effectively selecting EVERYTHING visible in the current virtual screen (which could be 1000's of objects). Old problem which adesk never fixed, but made worse when the ribbon was first introduced - if you turn off the ribbon then at least the hatch dialog pops up quicker.
Can't remember when this was introduced though - the HPDLGMODE allows the faster opening of the dialog, but you're still stuck with a slow command-line version. Thus far I know of no way to force a select boundary hatch as the default when the hatch command starts.