john1993:
ahh... those are great projects and worth checking out later but might not be what im after atm. right now my requirement is specifically for bootloader development... any help there would be greatly appreciated.
The solution I suggested can be used to program bootloaders. In the 2 minutes you say it takes avrdude to do its stuff you could copy the file to an SD card, and program it, much faster.
Getting another programmer may not help, if you are still using avrdude. There is a programming command to erase all flash (which takes a few microseconds) which is what my programming sketch does.