Regarding the time to degree issue, I too think that the figures being bandied about are exaggerated. I completed my Ph.D. in English two years ago, and it took me four years. For three of those four years, I taught between 3 and 5 classes per semester (almost all comp.), I taught every summer, and I became a parent. I do not know anyone who took more than 6 years to complete a doctorate in English. In fact, in the doctoral program I was in, there is an 8-year time limit. Yes, I worked my butt off to finish in four years, but the people I knew who took longer than four years were not teaching much and weren't parents - they just worked at a slower pace, or had a larger body of criticism to read than I did.
As far as the job market goes, I was well aware of how dismal it was and is when I began my M.A., and none of the faculty I worked with ever pretended otherwise. In fact, and here I was incredibly lucky, from the very first semester of my M.A., all the way through to graduating with my doctorate, the faculty constantly reminded me of how hard it would be to get a job and worked very hard at helping me find ways to be one of the lucky ones to land a t-t job. I was lucky enough to land a t-t job while ABD, and I attribute that success to the following: lots of teaching experience, plenty of publications, great mentoring, and a whole lotta luck.
Maybe I'm misremembdering, but didn't you do your degree in another (non-US) country? That can make a difference in time to degree. Not to suggest that your accomplishment isn't impressive, but where I went to school, that kind of timeline would not have been possible. The speed demons in my class took 4 years to complete, and both of them came in with MAs. The average time was 6-7 yrs.
