I personally feel that approval time on EsoUI is really short. Usually it is almost instant and I never wait longer than 2 hours. If I update addon on Curse it could take up to 12 hours before site admin approve my uploads (right now my Dustman waiting for approval on Curse almost 5 hours).
Currently Cairenn is on vacation so we are down a person helping on the file queue. That said if you upload a file early morning (CST) on a sunday most likely you'll have to wait a bit.
That said we should probably see if any one wants to volunteer their time in the early mornings to help moderate the queue.
Yes it can be very frustrating but I must say that averaged over the years (thinking sister site wow interface) with reference to Curse and you can give me ESOUI any day. Curse is so frustrating that when I make a change at the Forge, I put a message into my Curse AddOn description informing people to download from HERE as the change is gonna take several hours.