If all you're looking for is the ability to get the upstream updates immediately, you can also just download the tarball version and unpack it somewhere under your home directory. Then dump a .desktop file for each in ~/.local/share/applications/ so it shows up in your app menu.
No startup slowness, and you'll still get the vendor-provided updates as they're released.
I'm curious why this got downvoted -- would it not work?
My only con is that the defaults update all snaps like every day, and I really would like to have better control on that, because I'm always on mobile data.