Is it taking 15 minutes to redeploy/ rebuild cache? That is way too long. On my local machine it takes about 3 minutes, on a nice dedicated server from EWD it seems like it is about half that.
The rebuilding cache process is extremely annoying. When I first started working with XC5 it almost made me give up. But either I have learned to avoid it more, by working in the var/run directory while testing, or I have simply gotten used to it.
Any major code change or module installation/enabling, you have to rebuild. Template changes can be uncached if you set developer mode On in etc/config.php, that helps a lot.