Active connections and sync-ing my wallet issues
I just synced Bitcoin Core from scratch in about three hours yesterday on my home computer. The active connection count is not likely to be the bottleneck, it's usually rather the Disk R/W or the verification work done on the CPU. External drives exacerbate the Disk R/W delay significantly. If you have a few GB on your main drive, you could try to run a pruned node on your main hard drive, that would at least mitigate some of the Disk R/W delays, especially if your drive is an SSD. Another thing that can speed the process up significantly is to give your Bitcoin Core more RAM.