I have a letancy-sensitive legacy application, where the time consumed by query planning was always causing some headaches. Currently it is running on postgresql-8.4 - will postgresql-10 support generating plans using multiple CPU cores to reduce the time required to generate a single plan?
no. PostgreSQL 9.6 and higher uses more CPU only for execution.
For planner speed are important GUC parameters join_collapse_limit, from_collapse_limit and show geqo_threshold.
You can try to decrease geqo_threshold - with low geqo_threshold you can increase join_collapse_limit and from_collapse_limit