GradleRIO has recently been updated to be 2017 compatible. Deploy times are anywhere from 5-15 seconds. For each deploy, there are only 3 ssh sessions (one for discovery, one for NI utils, one for user code), and libraries are only deployed if they have changed or have not been deployed before (e.g. wpilib, opencv, talonsrx, cscore, etc).
You can see the project here:
https://github.com/Open-RIO/GradleRIO