I applied for an account on November 20th, 2018 and didn't get approved until Jan. 9th 2019, so a bit over 7 weeks. I was going to go somewhere else cause of the long wait, but I really like the idea and philosophy of steemit. However, everything is really difficult, there is very little design control, though I haven't tried dropping in my own html yet. Also little things, like the comment button says "reply" not comment, it's a really frustrating experience to navigate everything. I hope it gets easier as time goes by as I love the idea of the steemit platform, but if there is going to be more user appeal, it needs to function like other more familiar platforms and the process really needs to be streamlined and quicker to become a member.