eriknyquist:
yes, that is one way of doing it, if you have a LOT of spare time
I don't understand why you think that the time taken is "a lot". The source code for the libraries you use is readily available under the Arduino directory (for the standard libraries) and under your sketches directory (for libraries that you have added).
If you want to see what your sketch looks like after the IDE has converted it from .ino to .cpp then you can turn on verbose output in the IDE options and then look for the message telling you where the IDE has placed your temporary files. I can't imagine many situations where that would be necessary, though.