I also have that problem
time leon
lein 8.70s user 0.45s system 159% cpu 5.739 total
Saying "oh fix your whatever" is just passing the buck. This is a frequent enough problem to be a major issue. If there are more than a few of these issues people will simply move elsewhere. Rightfully so too.
The lein help command does more than simply print a string, it searches for plugins available on your system. To measure the startup time of lein perhaps you should do:
Less than a second, not bad.> time lein shows about 10 seconds to display all the output, and then it hangs for about a minute more before the process completes.
So there's a problem on your system. Most people don't have that problem. Check your plugins.