It’s slow, really slow and continues to be slow.
I know Unity 5 helps a little with this, but this really needs to be addressed.
It’s painfully slow at times. It’s a common joke with Unity devs I know that the asset store is running on an old Xbox.
I also really wish there was a way to update assets outside of Unity so we can schedule them to keep them up to date. Right now I sync to a symbolic link on dropbox so both Windows & Mac machine have latest assets, but it only works when I go in and update them. I would love to see this done automatically so I don’t have to keep checking and updating them.
More important, some way to “subscribe” to release note changes for my assets. If there was a way to update out of unity, I’d script it to send me a daily email of the release notes for the changes. It would be nice to see this functionality available some how as I suspect you will never be able to download assets outside of Unity so there won’t be any way for me to do this on my end.