What level of precision do you consider to no longer be a general purpose meter? For me I'm thinking 7.5 digit and 8.5 digit are not general purpose.
At my place everyone has at least one 6.5 digit meter.
There's not much in the price between a 5.5 digit and 6.5 Benchtop meter, so I don't tend to bother even looking at the 5.5 digit models.
That's a fair question and I suppose different people use the term 'general purpose' differently. I was thinking 'basic', like check this battery or do a quick continuity check. I'm not at a bench full time or even every day, so leaving the meters on all the time is not really a good option. In the sense that they do everything--capacitance, diodes, current, frequency, digitizing--I suppose modern 6.5 digit meters are 'general purpose', but so are many 7.5 and 8.5 digit models. My thought is that if you actually need 6.5 digits worth of precision, waiting 30 seconds is no big deal--you can turn the meter on first and then get set up to measure.
That said, I suppose 25 seconds from standby is a bit hard to understand--why even have the standby function? Still, I think the best solution is multiple meters since it is pretty common to need to measure 2-3 things at once. After some experimentation, I settled on the solution pictured--the 'boot times' from top to bottom are ~15 seconds (2 sec from standby), 3 seconds and 0 seconds. This works better than handhelds because I don't have to rummage around for the meter, find a place to put it and untangle the test leads--it's just there and ready to go. I don't know what you can buy commercially today to replace these.