EndNote 8.1 seriously slow on MacOS 10.13

Longtime Endnote/Mac user here (15+ years). Was forced into upgrading to X8 (from X7) when I updated Word 16 and found that this borked X7. $100 later, I also am finding X8.2 (build 13302) painfully slow under 10.13.3 (running on a 2013 13" Macbook Pro, 16 GB RAM). Every click on a new reference in my library is 5-10 sec of spinning disk wait time. Every click between my library and the PubMed is likewise slow. I suspect that the delay has to do with the new cloud-based library storage, which clearly is being pushed by the developers, but which I neither need nor want. If this doesn’t get resolved, I will have to switch to another biobliography app.