The only places that did were tiny folks
Gox isn't tiny.
that used to trade a virtual currency for cards from a nerd-game.
Their previous business has nothing to do with their current incompetence.
The market grew faster than they were ready
Sure, the alleged 20,000 new users per day would have been a strain, but this could have been handled if they had the foresight to build a scalable system. Instead, they were lazy and cheap. There are other factors to the Gox lag that they are entirely able to mitigate. But again, they're lazy and cheap, and were making a shitton of profit from being that way.
Fuck them.