Have you heard of the steeminvite service? It's a website you can use to create steem accounts by sending email invitations to friends and paying a small fee for them to create accounts. I haven't used it, but it seems like a good solution to the wait time problem, and at relatively low cost.
RE: So far there has been 54 #steemtalent Open Invitations that have gone out and what most people may not realise is that behind these invitations is roughly about +250 hours of hard graft..!!