I just got and try the 970. It's like a night and day on the before and after.
This massively improved the text where I can actually read it. The graphics are great (with a few edges on high details areas).
RIP twinkling stars
BTW, this one thing made the loading times from about 3 min to 20 seconds, and the loading time in station services from 30 seconds - 1 min to 3 seconds. But, I'm also with an i7 and 16GB of ram.
While the GPU could potentially affect your ability to load the game (textures, shaders etc into VRAM) or through overall system stability; more likely what you were experiencing is slowness in your connection to the FDEV server that handles all the handshaking. (Slowness at their end or yours.)
I'm using an 840 EVO ssd and loading times can be really quick and then sometimes really slow on ED; if I load Farcry 4 however, despite that it is far more stressing on my computer as a whole and uses far more video memory, Farcry 4 routinely loads almost immediately.
I am quite confident it is a connection issue perhaps with FDEV having limited logon servers and your wait being tied to queue times to use those servers.
Alternatively it is based on the objects within the system you are loading into - so a system with 32 objects would take longer than a system with 4. But I still think that connection speed is much more likely.
On the more relevant part of your post : I am happy to see you are enjoying your upgrade

Feel free to add me in game and if we are on together sometime we can meet up and make an Oculus wing to do some flying together.
With the recent changes to combat and exploration rewards I have switched from trading my way to a better ship to getting my combat experience up and I currently inhabit solo mode while I learn how to deal with each ship and load out.
My CMDR name is as is on the forum.