@matthewtodd @rudle @strongriley
tl;dr: this speeds up ,a and ,t by removing conflicting mappings.
The Align plugin comes with AlignMaps which adds a bunch of mappings for special kinds of alignments. I never use these and I don't know if anyone else does. This wouldn't be a problem except that many of them begin with ,a or ,t, which forces vim to wait to make sure you really meant ,a and ,t when you type them before running the associated command. This makes those commands appear to be slow. My solution is to run AlignMapsClean if the plugin has been loaded when vim starts up. This has the effect of removing the AlignMaps plugin from the Align plugin so that the next time you start vim the commands will be fast. First-time users would see slowness with ,a and ,t the first time they launch vim using maximum-awesome.