What is your domain misura? I fixed the problem of reported panel slowness. If your domain is down for longer then about an hour and there isn't a status.dreamhost.com post about it, you are almost guarenteed that it is just a misconfiguration with your account.

I agree with you that response times for support replies should always be under 24 hours and ideally they should be responded to within a couple hours. We have 3 new support technicians starting this week.