How does

deferred_init

affect the process?

It ders all the networking and stuff in the background (usually the part that might slow the Task initialization process)

Also, is there a way of specifying a blacklist instead of a whitelist of features?

BurlyPig26 you can while list per framework and file name, example
task = Task.init(..., auto_connect_frameworks={'pytorch' : '*.pt', 'tensorflow': ['*.h5', '*.hdf5']} )What am I missing ?