Best solution. When you get a new game, as soon as you get home, turn on your console and start install. Comeback later and start update. Then when your gaming time comes around you are all set. At least that's what I do.

If your gaming time is right when you get home, while installing/updating turn on one of your other consoles and game or watch Netflix.

It's just part of modern gaming.

Reading your previous posting again, I just realized that it was ambiguous and I probably just misinterpreted it, as I thought you claimed that Sony would forbid mandatory installs next generation, which of course really would be utter "nonsense" as I'm sure you'll admit. So I guess I need to at least partially apologize.

What you're saying about the BD drive being slow is absolutely correct of course, but I still believe you're wrong about this being the reason for mandatory installs. As I said, there are very good reasons for mandatory installs. PC games have been using mandatory installs for ages, despite lacking slow BluRay drives. Microsoft was forced to allow them mid-generation, despite originally introducing a "no mandatory installs"-policy. And despite the "slow BD drive" issue probably being largely resolved next generation, Sony is not changing their policy on mandatory installs - instead, Microsoft is adopting it.

So there are very good reasons to allow mandatory installs. Most games can perfectly live without them (actually, I cannot remember that even a single of my PS3 games required them), but for some types of games it's extremely hard, if not impossible, to develop the game the way you want to without making use of mandatory installs.

So the big question is not: Why should a video game console manufacturer allow mandatory installations?

Instead, the obvious question is: Why should a video game console manufacturer forbid video game developers to use mandatory installs if the game developer thinks that it would improve the experience?

The answer to that question is simple: Until last/current generation, video game consoles simply didn't have the storage space. They were usually using memory cards with almost no storage space, so mandatory installs were technically impossible.

But when the PS3 came out and absolutely all models were equipped with at least several gigabytes of storage space, there was just no reason to forbid game developers to use mandatory installs if they considered them useful.

The situation was just a little different on the 360. Microsoft decided to release a budget version of the 360 without harddisk, and thus decided to forbid mandatory installs to not confuse and anger Arcade owners. You can even find interviews with prominent game developers from several years ago (I think they were from Rockstar, if I remember correctly) where they said that Microsoft's biggest mistake with the 360 was the decision to sell a budget version without harddisk, because that decision meant that game developers could not make use of mandatory installs.

Updates since 2011 are much smaller. Before that was a problem.

The DMC4 one is ridiculous.  The file size is 2-3GB but it takes an hour or two for the mandatory install. 

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*edit*

One problem with mandatory installs though isn't that the bluray drive is too slow for the game.  It's that there some devs that use the feature to skimp out on putting more effort in porting the game over to the PS3.

Uncharted 1, 2, and 3 are easily some of the best looking games on the PS3 and require no mandatory install, while there are a lot of games that aren't open world that look much worse than those games and do require them. 

Once the game is installed you can keep playing it, but I think they shouldn't have allowed mandatory installs.  Instead, Sony should have mandated that every retail game includes an optional install.  This would have forced the developers to put more effort into porting the games over to the PS3 and the optional install would have only sped up loading times and minor pop in here and there.