Hello Brad, and welcome to the forum.
I have found the sheetmetal package to be a -huge- overhead on CPU cycles. When I do a heavy sheetmetal session, I can literally smell my laptop's power supply being overworked. So that is internal to the code.
As for lightening the load, dial down the graphics options. You can see the relevant settings here in my post: Problem with animation graphics
Also change the model save option in config.pro to manage better file sizes of your saved parts and assemblies. This will make the save process a bit quicker too. I haven't found a downside to doing this yet.
config.pro > save_model_display wireframe
No help here on the bend table defaults but a custom user template file seems a likely way to do this. Just be careful about custom files of all types inside the Creo loadpoint. Upgrades to the software will delete these folders. Best to specify libraries outside the loadpoint.