A large percentage of people are approved within 24 hours actually. 3 business days is when most accounts are approved by.
There have still been a lot of accounts taking longer than that, but most of them are actually because they are getting flagged for various reasons (wife and husband signing up on the same computer, etc.) If there are any accounts that have taken more than 3 days, you can DM me on steemit.chat and I'll forward to Steemit to review.
There are still services like AnonSteem and SteemConnect which people can use if the Steemit.com signup doesn't work (or they don't want to wait).
I know that improving the signup process is a big priority for Steemit, so hopefully we'll see some proposals on how they plan to improve it soon.