How can I make breaking walls less tedious?

The background "walls" in Terraria are incredibly tedious to break down. Maybe it's because the hammer is so. damn. slow. or maybe it's just a figment of my imagination since the wall tiles have bigger sprites than non-wall sprites.

It's important to rid your base of places where monsters can spawn but I can't convince myself to clear out all the dirt and replace it with stone at the current speed. I understand the standard ways of breaking the background but even the most advanced hamaxes still have a speed of slow. Is there an item that speeds up this task? Or a particular method that you use to break it as fast as possible?

Attack speed (Slow) is not the same as wall-breaking speed. You know the 'ticks' you hear when you are mining or chopping or breaking down walls? With the meteorite hamaxe, it reduces the 'ticks' to 2 for destroying a wall tile.. This is, in my opinion, a significant upgrade from the gold hammer (What I had previously).

So end of the day, even though the attack speed for hammers is slow, the rate at which they can affect the environment is faster.

UPDATE: With the 1.1 update, as well as before this, a few passes have been made to make destruction and building of the background walls to be slightly less tedious.

Since 1.3.0.1 update, it is possible to place player placed walls directly on natural ones (or other player placed) in order to replace them. Should replaced wall be obtainable, it will drop as if mined. When replacing natural walls, it is still required that you start from a boundary/corner area of the wall, replacing at center of natural wall is not possible.

As noted on Gamepedia Wiki:

Now you can place walls in front of each other.

the formulation is misleading though, it's replacement, no wall is actually placed in front of other wall.