Ok, so I spent all day yesterday reloading clean installs of everything, one by one and checking it. I believe I have found the problem for those of you might find this thread later.
I guess when PS 2017 released, it thoroughly no longer supported the Nik Collection plug ins from google. My iMac was a set up with migration assistant from an earlier mac and had since been upgraded with Creative Cloud. So I guess by way of that it kept working with the Nik collection even though it was at this point incompatable with the plug in installs. But when I used migration assistant to move to the MacBook, I guess that was the final straw and those plug ins were causing some kind of major slowdown in the application. As I pieced through the installs I got to Nik, it installed, I checked it, PS loaded fine, but the plug in was missing from the filter drop down. Porting them over from the old machine doesn't make them appear either. That's the only variable in the system at this point, no Nik Plug Ins present in PS. And looking around online it seems the only way people have gotten it to work has been because they had previous versions of PS on their machine at one time. This being a fresh machine with a fresh install, and the new PS 2017 being out pretty recently, I imagine it must be something in the perfs or library or something that was allowing it to be grandfathered in with a system with previous 2015.5 installs which isn't present on the new machine, as the absence of those seems to be allowing PS to run normal.... I imagine this problem is going to start appearing for a lot of people in the coming months. Way back when Google bought the Nik software, I swear thats what everyone was worried about, it would eventually become abandon ware....
