power query design patterns?

At work, I'm stuck with 32 bit Excel,which I understand is known for poor power query performance. This is also my personal experience. Typically when I start a new Power Query project, all goes well for a couple of days, until things get increasingly complex, and everything slows down to the point where I spend 10 times as much time waiting for refreshes than actually developing, which is highly frustrating. By the time the refresh finishes, I've often forgotten what I wanted to do next. I'm not getting any younger :( What I've started doing is splitting my project into two or more workbooks, each of which does some power query heavy lifting, such that my 'dashboard' workbook does very little recalculation, it just connects to the latest refreshed data in the underlying workbooks. This approach works well for me, but I haven't seen it covered anywhere, so I was wondering if any of you adopted the same approach, or had other better techniques to address this problem. I feel that PQ is still quite immature in many ways, especially the IDE. This said, I think it's already very powerful, and I look forward to what the next few years will bring.