Hey,
long time no see 🙂
For the particular theme I refactored the sections on the page with the massive amount of ACF-Groups into subpages with respective ACF-Groups each. That sped up the process on each of the subpages of course.
It was a cumbersome (but fun) little Weekend Project to migrate the data that was already there to this new “schema” with a lot of scripting and custom SQL-operations (invoked with Sequel Pro) to get the data from the fields into the fields of the new subpages.
I am not so much into these kind of projects anymore, but nowadays I would just do it with a Headless CMS (Contentful and the like) if there was a way to communicate it to the customer. Then you could get your data from there into your WordPress theme via their php-sdk.
Using a Headless CMS has many other advantages that you have to buy with some additional work of course (page preview-process setup, …) – and these of course won’t sell so well (or it could be their USP) if you try to make a complete WordPress theme for Themeforest/et al.
I still think ACF is cool for a lot of projects and I have nothing but fond memories 🙂
All the best to John and ACF
