Also how does this adversely impact bitcoin as a whole seeing as my last 2 transactions took 30 minutes to over an hour to get just 3 confirmations. Doesn't having confirmations that slow hurt us?
Its called variance and you will always have that, whether the network is growing, shrinking or stable. IF anything, because of its exponential growith in the past 6 months confirmations have
on average been way faster than they were last year and way faster than they likely will be by the end of next year. That doesnt mean you wont sometimes see several hours for 6 blocks, thats just the nature of probability which underpins mining.