How much memory do you have?
Do you have an HDD or SSD?
Obviously, syncing will happen faster on a SSD than an HDD. With that being said, blocks from around the 97th percentile (or anything mined one year ago) are plagued with Ordinals transactions which are really heavy and take a long time to process, so that is probably the reason why verification has slowed down.
You can use the addnode RPC call to add some other peers if it's not connecting to any for some reason.
I have a 2TB HDD (circa ~2017) and a Core i5 4th gen (current generation being 14). I've used various Internet connections, some fast, some slow. I typically run it overnight.
I did a partial sync of just the first 250GB, maybe a year ago, I was using a Raspberry Pi 4 and my old circa-2010 250 GB SSD, and a 200mbs Spectrum connection. That went pretty quick.
The original time when I synced the full blockchain was at the beginning of the pandemic and it went very fast over LTE. During the pandemic my phone carrier gave my $30/month connection unlimited hotspot data. I was using the HDD then and a Core i5 5th gen.
If I use addnode RPC, whose server would I be adding?
Is there a risk that Ordinals might burden the blockchain and make it unusable?
