Ask HN: How to Reduce Time Spent Crimping?

I’ve worked on the design-end of engineering for some time, and have done my share of crimping for prototyping / development, but have never done electrical design for mass production. I’m now working with a small company who is scaling up their early prototypes, and we’re going to assemble the early ones in house — think 10s of units. This is the first time that I’m involved in this scale of manual assembly. I find I’m spending significant time _just making crimps_, and this makes me wonder if I can get better at making crimps, or make a design change to simplify the assembly. I take about 60 sec per crimp, and I don’t have the exact tools in this guide, but it is basically what I do: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jHfYzrSF4pY

Here’s the design constraints that come to mind:

1. We have about 15 connections to make

2. Most of our connections are JST-XH, some are JST-SM. We could maybe simplify to just JST-XH and then buy pre-crimped wires, but we like having the locking connections for wire-to-wire connections

3. Sometimes we need different connectors at opposing ends of wire, but if we buy pre-crimped SM and SH we could splice the appropriate lines together.

4. We want to keep the 2.54mm pitch, to interface with simple OTS boards

My best ideas:

1. Buy pre-crimped JST-XH wires, and change one end to JST-SM as needed. This should get rid of ~80% the crimping effort.

2. Move entirely to JST-XH, buy pre-crimped wires, and accept slightly worse wire-to-wire connections.

3. Buy better crimp tools, practice like hell, and ‘git gud’

Are there other ideas I should consider? Is there a secret or a better guide to crimp faster? I know this is a noob-ish question, any help is appreciated. I have googled, searched youtube, and asked the various LLMs, and the ideas listed above are the result.