There are a set of test that are quick to run and give useful feedback, and other tests that are more specialized. One idea to speed up PR gates is to divide them into different sets, having basic tests and comprehensive tests. PRs would still require both to run, but we could only queue the fast running basic tests by default, and require the PR to queue the full set of tests once the PR is in a more complete state or ready to merge.
This would probably require some kind of github bot or such to do this.