Been playing with Solana a lot more lately, but price quotes are sluggish, 50% of my trades fail, trades take ~15 seconds to complete, and I have to break my trades up into much smaller increments to get them through. 

Any tips on how to get a better experience here? Moved my slippage up to 1% and that helped.

Just be patient. Also try switching where you’re trading. I’ve had different experiences with different tokens using Phantom, SolFlare, Jupiter, Fluxbeam and Birdeye. Different exchanges get clogged at different times.

Dad. Teacher. Filmmaker. Booty shaker. Crypto dabbler.

Phantom, Solflare and Birdeye are all using the same source: Jupiter, which is an aggregator of different liquidity pool providers on Solana.  There's only a handful of places that natively support creation of LPs: Raydium, Orca, Fluxbeam, Meteora, DEXLab are the main ones. Jupiter covers all of them by default FYI.