Your file data made me smile.

I can see why things are slower than you would like.

I didn't pay attention enough to notice that your diamond plate texture that you modeled also as fillets on each feature.

Thems is some things you might want to only to last and possibly in a seperate file while leaving a base, dimensionally accurate in the critical areas, bounding box in its place so you can still model with the precision that you need while reducing overhead. That is a ton of overhead to deal with for no reason. Even just using a naked / smooth top surface while you model rather than the textured surface multiple thousands of unneeded surfaces.

Hi Chris, also some tips for making that type of pattern:

You can prepare one cell with a plane at the bottom:



You can then array that:



And then select all the cells and use boolean union which will merge the bottom planes:



But construct this as one of the last steps, not while still modeling.

- Michael