We are apparently not the only ones who feel the pain of Eclipse's long startup time. The good news is that there's a simple solution. According to an Eclipse developer, you can instruct Eclipse not to load some plugins during startup at the Startup and Shutdown Preference page (see screenshot below)

In my setup I've unchecked everything except Equinox auto-update plugin (I suspect that one is not really needed either) and it makes a noticeable difference in the startup time.

BTW, in case you don't know already, in the Preferences you can set Show Line Number, which makes debugging quite a bit easier.