That makes sense. I actually never use daemon mode because I don't want to share buffers. If want a faster start up time but don't want to share buffers you may want to look at use-package[1] which will lazy load plugins. Also, if you want a easy way to cycle through buffers that also works in the terminal I recommend iflipb[2]. When you start cycling, it shows a list of buffers in the mini-buffer. Both of those are available as packages in Melpa.

[1] - https://github.com/jwiegley/use-package [2] - https://github.com/jrosdahl/iflipb