So, what good is Time Machine really?

My Macbook Pro unexpectedly quit and I eventually had to erase and start over. I have been running Time Machine religiously, so I thought I was golden. I have tried to load a (different) Time Machine backup twice. Each time it says it will take around 135 hours! Really? Almost 6 DAYS to copy? Then, at the end I get a message saying either an error occurred and it was unable to complete the recovery and to try again, or at "approximately less than a minute remaining." it stops for hours and hours doing nothing. After rebooting, I'm back with a blank hard drive.

Am I resigned to manually rebuilding my whole system and then copying individual files from my backups? It seems to me that Time Machine is worth about what I paid for it.

Very frustrated. If anyone has ANY suggestions, I'm open to try anything at this point.