Indesign 5.5 or 6 + yosemite = production at standstill

Question

recently I brought into a production of about 25 mixed OS 10.6.8 and 10.9.4 Xeon Mac Pros and i7 iMacs two additional iMacs running Yosemite 10.10
When the graphic artists who need these systems work on shared InDesign pages the redraw (with multiple layers) is measured in an unresponsive system for at the very least 5 - 10 minutes as opposed to seconds on all the other systems not running Yosemite.
there are 8 iMacs in the area, all with i7 3.5GHz., GTX 775M 2GB Nvidia cards, 16 GB RAM (directly from Apple)
Six of them are running Mavricks where this slow behavior simply does not happen., the other two are on OS 10.10.1 where it does. All these computers were unboxed and Adobe CS 5.5 was installed along with the 2014 Java, there was no image involved.
I am able to reproduce this slowness on the 2.26GHz. Dual Xeon 8GB RAM, 512MB Nvidia, OS 10.10.1 system [see "i have tired the following]" using InDesign CS6
Upgraded to CC is not an option since I'm not budgeted to upgrade 25 macs on a $2500 a month cost cycle for the foreseeable future, but I am seriously looking at going to Windows.
I have tired the following:
Verifying permissions on the Macintosh HD
Copying the document to a new document on the desktop
Re-saving the document as a new document to reset the meta-data
Shutting off all fonts that are not needed.
under Display Performance
turing down the display settings in InDesign to "Typical"
under Preference>Interface:
unticking all features under Cursor and Gesture options
unticking all features under Panels
Setting Hand Tool Performance to minimum (Better Performance)
Live Screen Drawing is set to Delayed (or None; neither helps)
Turned pre-flight off all documents.
all these features are currently running on the systems with Mavericks and they respond quickly even with all of them enabled.
Is there some way I can downgrade these systems to mavericks or has anyone seen this and found a fix?
These brand new systems are being outperformed by the 5 year old mac pros they are replacing.

Answer 1

I've seen behavior like this on InDesign pages that require multiple layers, and it makes no sense at this time
1) make the layers visible.
2) drag the selection over an area with multiple items
3) CMD+Shift+LMB to resize
the result is Yosemite (on two iMacs and on MacPro Dual Xeon) took almost 10 minutes to complete the resize, there is also a long delay in Mavericks as well which i did not see before since this was reported to me and I watched as 3 different and very experienced InDesign users (two on Yosemite, one on Mavericks all on identical i7 iMacs) showed results where Mavericks was clearly faster in this particular operation.
When I switch the operation and do step 2 before step 1 the result is the resize takes about 15 - 20 seconds in Mavericks, and slightly longer in Yosemite the first time it's done, however subsequent resizes in Yosemite are subject to the prolonged delay and I can not reproduce a similar delay in Mavericks at this time.
To further complicate this any non-default setting InDesign to speed up the interface is actually slowing down the entire process with the exception of the view delay which does not perform a redraw during the drag operation.
When time allows I need to evaluate what's being used in the pages, fonts, images, effects, but my schedule will not allow me to do this either this week or next.