>> I immediately submitted my information, thinking that I’d get the domain name pushed to my account later that day. Instead it took twenty days.

There's no way that it should taken 20 days, that's just totally unacceptable. And as someone who buys and sells lots of domains on a regular basis, I can tell you that this is not the norm, it's unusual for it to take this long.

One thing that you probably didn't check was whether or not the domain name was listed for sale at other venues. If the domain you wanted (based on a whois lookup) was at GoDaddy, then most likely it would have been listed at GoDaddy as many sellers will list their domains on several sites.