schiddy- IMO some stuff just takes a long time if you want to do it right...but then I'm the guy who spends several hours doing a "really fast" wash on the beaters (and you don't want to know how long it takes to do a careful wash on the good cars!). With experience, you'll learn which processes you can speed up (or even eliminate), which corners are safe to cut. Until you're certain that doing that won't cause some problem that you'll regret, I'd just let it take as long as it takes to err on the side of caution.
Try to cut out purely wasted time. E.g., for me, that means having redundant systems (hoses/buckets/etc.) on each side of the wash bay so I'm not wrestling with dragging stuff around the car. Not saying you need to do that, but see if there's anything truly *inefficient* about what you're doing now. You can waste a lot of time without even realizing it.
For the correction, using the right stuff can make a huge difference. People waste time with big pads and too-mild products; if you're not getting a section significantly better after 15 minutes then something's wrong. E.g., M105's work time is less than a minute per section, and four or six tries with M105 (on the *right* pad) should be sufficient in most cases; that's not long to get the heavy compounding done, even if the sections are each pretty small (I work areas about 1' x 1' ).