I tuned disabled theming and the build time dropped by almost a minute. It still take a few seconds more than in Tokyo though.
What is strange is that when I reenabled theming just to verify that theming was causing the problem, the flickering stopped, and the build time improved to ca. 1 min 20 sec.
Still slower than with Tokyo.
After flickering stopped the build time decreased dramatically. Unfortunately never got to figure out what was causing the flickering as it stopped happening after modyfing the settings.