Probably the best thing for restore from a config is Restore from configuration just below “Direct restore”.
Going down the “Add backup” --> “Import from a file” path might not make the partial temporary database created from the Restore tab options on the left. I haven’t tested this lately, but if it offers a Recreate since there’s no database, it will likely do a slower full Recreate so you can continue doing backups, but danger exists if the exporting PC is also doing backups (leading to the clash of two PCs backing up to one folder).
For your timing comparisons, do you recall if you had Duplicati do a full Recreate? The restore options are usually faster I think, however since your backup was likely very new, it might not make much difference…
These are several years old, but might still be of interest:
Duplicati 2 vs. Duplicacy 2 (Duplicati forum)
Duplicacy vs Duplicati (Duplicacy forum)
One thing you can see there is that Duplicati by default does fine-grained deduplication at 100KB chunks. Duplicacy uses (or at least used) 4MB chunks. I think Duplicacy also gets speed with parallel downloads. Duplicati is adding parallel uploads in next true beta, but parallel downloads are only for Jottacloud, I think.