I’ve come up with a quick solution, albeit crude one.
I modified the “wordpress-https.php” basically commenting out the curl function calls in the get_file_contents() function. I put the variable $content=true as it appears that this is returned if the https call goes through without errors.
This effectively speeds everything up rather nicely.
I’d like to note that this is a rather obnoxious feature. While I understand what the author is trying to accomplish the side-affect is terrible (slow).