I'm not sure if these complaints were recent.  For me, I bought something on Monday,my first purchase with Bitcoins, and to my astonishment it was quick in terms of confirmation of bitcoin transaction.  I created another account and transferring a small amount from my main account to the new account, confirmation was pretty much instantaneous.  Once I purchased my items with the small funded account, that transaction of bitcoins was very quick.  I received confirmation on my phone literally 1 sec later.  The one thing that made me concerned was that retail's website took a while to send me any confirmation email letting me know the purchase was complete.  As for transaction fee, it was a small one .0005 BTC I believe, or whatever the decimal place is suppose to be but it was not very high at all.  That's my recent experience.