The 90 minutes is not - the blockchain has grown quite a lot since last year, and as for the 3.5 speed, I havn't tested it since Pieter's ultraprune - libcoin also has something similar to ultraprune, done directly in the sqlite database backend, but I should run a head to head again - could be fun. I would assume, though, that the result would be similar timings.

ultraprune made a huge difference. I think it's very likely that this claim is no longer true. Bitcoin got a lot more optimised since you first did libcoin.