I've received a response to my ticket saying that the withdrawal must have become stuck in transit and that they would chase it up at there end. I don't even know what this means.
This may be of interest to you:
http://gendal.wordpress.com/2013/11/24/a-simple-explanation-of-how-money-moves-around-the-banking-system/tl;dr: plenty of room for problems in the system of sending money between banks.
Even more so with bitcoin related businesses. I got an email from my bank about a transfer to btc-e, two weeks after it was stuck at a intermediary bank because they suspected fraud.
I never had problems withdrawing from Kraken. If you read the announcement thread, you'll notice that the majority of deposit/withdraw problems were due to banks or users entering incorrect or incomplete information.
Kraken aren't even responding to multiple tickets and multiple emails from several users for several months and you are blaming user error and banks, come on man get real.