"Play" Button Greyed Out

I recently started having problems with my launcher. Few days ago, it started doing the thing that it takes really long after starting up before the "play" button became active (not downloading, patching or anything, it simply stays up but does not do anything and the button can't be clicked, and then all of a sudden eventually checks out and can be run normally).

It usually took between 5-15 minutes. Today, it has been 30 minutes, then I restarted it, and it is still doing nothing.

Now, there may be one thing I suspect could be related to it. It started doing this a couple of days after I switched my patching to non-streaming (by disabling bitraider, as per one of the posts on this forum). The reason for doing that was that just before it (also quite inexplicably, after 7 years of playing the game) my launcher started getting stuck at "patching 0%" etc., a problem encountered by many people throughout the years, apparently. I did everything suggested to fix that one, in the end nothing helped but disabling the bitraider.

So that worked, but now, I have a different problem that nobody seems to have encountered, at least I haven't been able to find out any answers to that.

So once again: the play button is simply greyed out, and the launcher does not show anything else unusual aside from that (not patching, not updating, simply waiting).

All right, update: just as I finished typing this, my launcher absolutely randomly decided to again start working again after like 20 minutes of inactivity, and the play button became active. The point being, there seems to be no logic in this behaviour. In any case, I would prefer not to have to wait 20 minutes every time I start the game (with the uncertainty of how long is it actually going to be).

Any ideas and help is appreciated.