After being shocked by the 51 day estimated wait, we took some extra time to polish the first version of Dashify before submitting, since it wouldn’t have made a difference with that much of a wait.
On January 21st, we submitted the plugin, and at that time the wait had decreased to about 30 days.
On January 22nd, we received what appears to be an initial automated review of the plugin! It definitely seems to be moving faster than the estimates they gave, and it looks like all the changes requested are minor ones related to code quality.
We’ll be making the suggested changes and then resubmitting for a second round of review.
It’s not ideal to depend so much on a platform like this when creating your own business, since there is so much out of your control, but so far I’m pleasantly surprised by how quickly the WordPress plugin review process is going compared to their estimates.