Amazon EC2 Spot Instances very slow at getting accepted/starting

I think this is just to be expected; spot priced instances are instantiated on a supply and demand basis depending on your bid, so if there is a lot of demand your startup time is likely to increase.

In my experience, if you bid just below the price for an on-demand instance, you'll get your running instance within 20 minutes or so, but 30 minutes doesn't sound outside the normal range for startup times. If you want an instance up as fast as possible, you're always better off using an on-demand instance.

Maybe you could post another question detailing the other reasons you're losing faith in AWS; it's worked great for my company for the past 3 or 4 years.