Also, we may need to face the reality that much of the processing time is actually waiting time. They don't really "process" our applications for 6 month or so. They only look at our files for at most a couple of hours during the entire processing time, and the rest of the period is purely waiting without any activity.
The same may also apply to security screening. The other day, I talked to an immigration consultant about security screening, and she said if your security takes 6 months, at least five months are spent waiting for information, waiting for a response from another agency or country, or some administrative procedures. The real time they spend analysing your security data may be just less than half a day.