The thing is, people do not appear to realize that MtGox is not an actual real world currency or commodity exchange. And neither is any other bitcoin exchange. We can't apply real world standards to them.

The bitcoin exchanges are small, shady companies providing trading platforms for an experimental cryptocurrency. Nothing more.

The conspiracy theories run high here.

There is a bug here, and "network congestion" is in fact not a bad way to put it without going through the whole technical explanation.  Remember that MtGox don't use bitcoind to process bitcoin transactions other than for block validation.  It just doesn't scale to the amount of addresses they have (primarily) and transactions they have to keep track of.

Sometimes transactions take a very long time to confirm.  E.g. due to sending a small transaction without fees (user error), or (the BUG) trying to use a coinbase transaction with less than 100 confirmations.  Sometimes transactions fail to confirm for reasons I can't explain either.  You can get all og MtGox's unconfirmed transactions which are at least 2 hours old from the URL below, and use it to verify my claims.  It is updated every 20 minutes: https://data.mtgox.com/api/0/bitcoin_tx.php

When a transaction isn't confirmed after ~24 hours, MtGox tries to solve it by issuing a high fee transaction to itself where it spends one or more of the inputs of the unconfirmed transaction.  This will invalidate the unconfirmed transaction.  When the invalidating transaction has 6 confirmations, MtGox will issue a new transaction for the withdrawal, and this usually confirms at once.  But due to the coinbase bug, this may also be a troublesome transaction.  (The reason why support will ask you to wait 24 hours.)

Usually the list of unconfirmed transactions is short (~100 micropayment transactions with no fees).  This is rebroadcasted in longish intervals, but a rebroadcast doesn't help much because miners don't even forward those transactions with no fees.  Much less mine them.  When the list get very long, this becomes a bottleneck ("network congestion").  And it does for several reasons.  The main reason is the coinbase bug (known for a long time, and they should rally get this fixed), which leads to cancellation transactions, and when the cancellation transaction doesn't confirm, there will be another, etc.

So this is just a bug, not a form of capital controls.  AFAIK everyone have received their BTC withdrawal eventually.  But I am sure you conspiracy theorists won't let facts affect you.

On the other hand it is Sunday today.  Sunday is MagicalTux's coding day.  Let's hope fixing this bug is on top of his TODO list.

Since you asked...
Resellers of our Bitcoin Specie have been getting 30%+ more USD than they pay in Bitcoin.
http://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?&_nkw=bitcoin+silver+MSRP what they sell for
http://coldhardca.sh/BitColdHardCash/Rate what they buy for

Do you see it here?  Just convert it to hex (base64 decode), and you will see your address (in hex) in on of the transactions.  Decode it and check the inputs, etc.

No shit.  The obvious reason for this is that Mt. Gox does not do a good job of communications.

For my part, a lack of information is a neutral indication of incompetence.  Deliberate mis-information such as what they have produced with their 'several weeks' assertions are no longer neutral.  This has turn me hostile to Mt. Gox over the last few weeks.

I used this website to decode the text and then convert it to hex:
http://ostermiller.org/calc/encode.html

Couldn't find my btc address on there. Someone else on IRC suggested using my transaction number that was emailed to me. Didn't find anything. Not sure if I'm doing it correctly. I also converted it directly into hex and same result.

Actually, it is intentionally deceptive. When they say "network congestion", they are trying to imply that the problem is outside their control, some "congestion" in the real bitcoin network. Nothing could be further from the truth. Their "congestion" is completely inside their own systems.

They have tried to use that excuse on me with bitcoin deposits. My transaction had already received more than 23 confirmations on the live bitcoin blockchain and they still tried to blame "network congestion".

As Mt. Gox states on their website, there is a 1% fee for SEPA withdrawals, so that's what you "lost".

Miracles do happen from time to time. If 1 in 100 request gets filled, then its a good indication they are broke.

Very difficult for me.  I almost never think anything is true with 100% certainty.  I usually can only assign a probability to something, then shift it around as observations come in.  Anyway, I don't really understand your experiment as stated.  I'd like to though because I delight in fun thought experiments.

I'm much more hostile then friendly as long as they sit on my money and give me false information about when (and if) I can expect it.  OTOH, I had to force the situation in order to get verified, and I was under no false illusion about the severity of their problems and the kinds of difficulties I was very likely to face.  I'd prefer to see Mt. Gox emerge as a viable entity because I think it would be good for Bitcoin, and because I feel that they have done generally positive things for the ecosystem over it's life.  I think it a fair bet that if they survive at all, they will never achieve the dominance that they once commanded.  That is also a good thing in my opinion.