Any way on God's green earth to disable resuming applications after a crash?
Just to mention, 15 minutes to boot is way too much, no matter how many apps you have. I haven't seen that boot time since windows XP. 16 GB of ram and a slow hard drive may be your problem, so I'd consider an SSD which will speed your boot time up to 30 seconds.

Also make sure you don't have too many apps in your login items. Remove stuff you can start manually later when you need them. 

Finally make sure you have enough drive space, with 16 GB of ram, you need that amount of space to store the ram contents during suspend/resume and other operations. 

Anyway, in Lion (tho I recommend Mountain Lion instead) you can disable the Resume of applications straight from the System Preferences (and there are other tricks as well, easy to find).

If you are really going to switch to something other than Snow Leopard, I'd go Mountain Lion. I would venture and say Lion was the Windows Vista of the modern OS Xs :)