We are now over halfway through Oct 23rd requests. The next couple days withdraws mostly consist of smaller transactions so I think those should go a bit quicker.
Please keep in mind, we have been getting 50 to 100 withdraw requests a day.
At 20 to 50 minutes per manual transfer it is taking a while. We also noticed that larger transactions such as 50btc end up taking about 30 minutes before seeing them advertised to the network, and around 100btc taking as much as a full hour.
The other day I attempted to just move all funds to a new wallet and waited for a bit over 3 hours and the transaction never completed to the network.
At that point I returned to manual transactions. In the mean time I am working on a new system for better load handling and a method try to import the current wallet data to it so that as soon as it is ready we will be able to speed through the remaining withdraws at that time.
Just another idea that might or might not work. You said that you can send 50-100 btc in about an hour and even small transactions take at least 20 minutes. If you cannot move the whole clogged wallet to a clean one, why don't you send just 50-100btc at a time to a clean wallet. Then you could quickly process many small transactions from there.