Time Machine broken again

My latest Time Machine saga apparently started 12 days ago, though I wasn't aware of it until yesterday, when a helpful dialog popped up to tell me that a Time Machine backup of my MacBook Pro hadn't occurred in 11 days. Outstanding.

When I got home last night, I figured I would manually start a backup and let it run for as long as it took. Being the expert in Time Machine failure that I am, I knew that interrupting backups by putting the machine to sleep seems to confuse the whole process, and maybe I just hadn't had the machine awake enough within WiFi range of the Time Capsule recently. I started the backup, and we sat through a whole lot of "preparing". In fact, so much preparing that I fired up the Console about an hour later:

... /System/Library/CoreServices/backupd[4558]
Waiting for index to be ready (905 > 0)

"Well, we don't want to rush the index," I thought. "If the index is not ready, I can wait." At about the two hour mark, I set the energy saver preferences to keep the machine awake all night, and went to bed.

Almost 12 hours later, the console was reading:

... /System/Library/CoreServices/backupd[4558]
Waiting for index to be ready (905 > 0)

At that point I had to go to work, so I shut down yet another backup and took off. It's Friday now, so I guess plan B is to start another backup when I get home this afternoon, which can potentially run for about 60 hours before I need to interrupt it again.

My take on the issue is this: if your backup software needs more than 12 hours to decide what it needs to backup from a 160G disk, then your backup software is broken. It's a testament to the level of Mac Fanboy status I have achieved that I even persevere with Time Machine. The old Unix Me would have deleted this junk months ago.