I had plenty of transactions with less fees than that one and still got confirmed pretty quickly. The thing is why I am not seeying all my activity since 2013. Lots of already confirmed transactions are not showing anymore now.
Your older transactions were confirmed faster because there were hardly any transactions awaiting confirmation. As I wrote above, there are currently 23 thousand transactions which are in the mempool.
-zapwallettxes= Delete all wallet transactions and only recover those parts of the blockchain through -rescan on startup (1 = keep tx meta data e.g. account owner and payment request information, 2 = drop tx meta data)
Have you done it like it is described above? Using light client would be much faster for you since you are trying to spend all of your coins.