Yeah, I got antsy after the US election, and then the suggestion that UK employers would have to report non-UK employees (I work in HE - which means they would have been ultra-compliant and probably avoided renewing non-UK employee contracts...). But, as always: money ... and then time - I ran into the whole 'can't have been out of the country 1 year prior to submission' issue as well.
A colleague of mine got his citizenship a few months back and I think he said it took about 2 and a half months, which is pretty good! I think I waited longer for ILR, to be honest.
Mine should be a straight-forward app (I am boring), and I could fill it out without having to look much of anything up. I'm hoping to do it via the nationality checking service just to get it put through faster so I can get back to conferencing, research trips, and so forth sooner rather than later. The real sticking point is references - I have plenty of people to use, but having them sign off at roughly the same time is proving rather difficult (I'm guessing a gap of no more than a month between signatures is appropriate) - getting academics to do something is harder than herding amoebas, especially in the summer...