Hello Kaiser,
I’m glad to hear the SM200A is a better fit for your application.
There is overhead when using the queued sweeps for smaller spans (<1GHz). It sounds like you are getting around the best performance at that span. If you were willing to go to 300kHz RBW, you could get a bit faster sweep speed. See the attached image from the SM200A product manual that relates span and RBW to sweep speed. It should give you a good idea what kind of sweep speed you can achieve at various settings.
Based on the provided code, I think all the settings are being set to the optimal values for speed, except for maybe increasing RBW if you want to try that.
Let me know if you have follow up questions or comments.
Regards