Really? Over the years people have complained about this but I don't ever recall the wait time being so long. Perhaps just another ploy to weed out the opportunists from the serious?
The advice in the past was to keep an eye on the queue because people do cancel and, if you're quick, you can move up. I guess that still applies.
It has been like that for the whole part of this year until sometime in May a whole bunch of slots opened up. I was applying for my daughter and got a slot in DEcember.