As a 6 year old it taught both patience and troubleshooting, which is what want to help instill in my 7 year old son - plus the notion that you can truly own, understand, and hack your device, which sadly is gone from vast majority of tablets and phones and tvs and computers and even washing machines.
But agreed that as an adult with kids and job and family etc the wait is not ideal. Luckily, even in the 80s much c64 software was available on cartridges, and today there are even faster FPGA solutions :).