Not only slow, it is also expensive. Maybe the developer of ETH is planning to change the minimum gas price per transaction now since bitcoin's market value reaches new high at 18,000 USD lately.
But if this is just coding glitch, i hope that it will be fix very soon because my transactions in ETH are almost dead.
Vitalik was working on Raiden which is similar to Lightning Network, but im not sure if it's as good as Lightning Network, or a worse quality workaround. And don't forget the cryptokitties stuff is happening on-chain, ETH can't never get around this problem, it is too complex on-chain, by design, making it a mess when it comes to being conservative on the blockchain size..