Brandon, that 1,416 minutes sounds really bad, and it is just under twenty-four hours. So I looked up the times for bank transfers over Christmas just to compare. Turns out that a bitcoin transaction only takes between 16–25% of the time taken by the banks. Times vary but bank transfers sit between 4–6 days.
http://www.smh.com.au/business/payment-processing-takes-christmas-break-20111219-1p1xg.html
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/personalfinance/expat-money/8860887/Christmas-is-coming-but-whats-the-best-way-to-transfer-money-abroad-in-time-for-the-festivities.html

And while you're right that bitcoin is a long way from meeting a daily transaction needs, you've made me wonder if other cryptocurrencies are missing out on the poor performance criticism only because their systems are under less load.

Over the last year, bitcoin transactions per day peaked at 490,644 on December 14.
https://blockchain.info/charts/n-transactions

So I grabbed some other data to compare it with and found that bitcoin was the second highest with Ethereum managing more than three times as many transactions per hour. This is impressive considering that the Ethereum network is also running a lot of other processes through its in-built programming language.

What I get from this little dig around is that the only reason for bitcoin not meeting the current demand is design decisions that determine the bitcoin coding. The fact that decentralised consensus works at all is amazing and fantastic, but in the case of bitcoin, it appears to be failing the general community at this stage. And I'm left wondering if the main cause of this is that it is not community consensus anymore. Instead it is the consensus of a few massive mining operations who seem to carry a lot more weight than the few community nodes mining away on their personal computer.