I've also found that emailing them directly tends to get shit fast tracked.
It's crazy how my first payout was only a few days after, but every time afterwards has been 8+ days wait. You would think that the first payment is the one that would take longer for verification purposes, but alas.
I can understand needing upwards towards a week, but at one some point automated payment processing should be considered by Itch to alleviate this issues. Especially considering the amount of devs that use this as the main source for hosting their projects.
Manually checking every payment is a ridiculous task, particularly if many of those payments are a large sum of small payments.