Over 30 minutes for a single confirmation does not (and will not ever) work in the real world.
(Almost) Every time I start to believe that BTC is "going mainstream", I have a delay waiting for a 30+ minute block....

Gavin should just fork Bitcoin and fix this problem. That's what Satoshi would have done by now.

I guarantee this is not the case. Satoshi specifically said that a 10 minute block time was ideal because it reaches a balance between too short of block times (and having a lot of orphans) and having it take too long to have a TX get confirmed. He was fully aware that 10 minutes will only be an average and that it will sometimes take more then 10 minutes for a block to be found.
Gavin can not also just "fork" the protocol as he does not control what the miners accept. In order for the protocol to actually fork the miners must accept the fork or else no one will actually be using the new protocol
10 min is a good compromise. In the future, when the network rate is faster, it can be reduced.