Is it me or....if you read New Avengers #1 and then picked up this issue...you'd have lost no ground and completely understood everything going on? This story is crawling at a dead snails pace.
That wasn't my point. The point I was making was you could read issue #1 and then issue #17 and be kept up with the happenings of the title overall, you wouldn't be lost or feel the need to catch up with trades or back issues. Yes some small things aside from parrallel earths smashing into one another have occured, but not many. They used a DC idea from Identity Crisis to wipe caps mind and whore the idea out in the next summer event. That's about the only big thing to have been missed.
If you only care about actual progression of the main plot then your point has some merit. If you care about storytelling, character development (or deconstruction as is more the case) and tension then I can't agree with you. But yes, it has been slow, but I think it has felt more so due to delays and slowed down shipping pace. Storytelling-wise, reading it back-to-back, I'm not sure it feels that slow.