Glad it works.

That it works in safe mode is a sign that it’s an osx issue (if it would be an app issue it wouldn’t work neither nor).

Still i am curious if the added app is persistent when booting up normally.

Its important to understand that the merge process and exporting (e.g. PDF) is done by InDesign. So the process will never be faster than your machine processes these things.

We have test machines here ranging from Mac mini to Mac Pro and 10.13 to 10.16 big sur.

On all of them we get constantly faster results.

But additionally – as you have seen before – there are side facts influencing this e.g. where you save the data.

In summary, MyDataMerge cant neither make Indesign act faster nor can it make your machine faster.

We support you getting the best and fastest possible results out of it but limits are often settled off the scope of MyDataMerge.

You’ll hardly find any tool or script within InDesign doing things faster than this.

I’d like to dig in more into the automation pane thing once you have finished your open jobs. And if there’s anything else we can help you with just let me know.

Thats comparing apples with bananas :)
When you use InDesigns data merge without styling (obviously cause it can’t handle it), hundreds of records can be processed simultaneously. This isn’t possible when individual records need to be treated differently (cause they need applying styling. Additionally you added a resizing method which needs to be calculated by content each time to fit the text frame’s size. THese are all operations taking little time but multiplied by 1000 it is perceptible.
If you really want to compare, deactivate all styling including resizing options.

But at the end – what really matters – is the fact that getting the result you need, with styling, with resizing, way faster than using indesign native mail merge and doing the rest by hand.