Something seems off to me about this post.
One generally simulates the RTL long before doing anything with gates. Mostly because RTL is faster. Only when you have things sufficiently nailed down, have done all the timing analaysis, etc, do you start running gate sims.
Even for pretty damn large designs, compiling RTL shouldn't be a big hinderance…minutes instead of hours.
Considering the magnitude of complexity involved with gate sims, I find it hard to complain. I can't speak for other vendors, but Mentor's questa does a pretty amazing job at optimizing and running at "speed."
The main issue I think is that simulations are generally single core affairs. When you've got millions of gates in your design, having to serialize that event simulation down to a single core is surely going to be a bottleneck.
When the simulators can run on multiple machines, partitioning the design (this is the tricky part), and run more in parallel, we'll see some speed advances.
But for that to work, you'd have to be very careful how you do your design. If it's spaghetti with tentacles reaching out from every part of the design to every other part, you probably won't have much luck splitting that up for parallel sims.
Personally, I think verilog is weird, but I come from a VHDL background. Like verilog you have a subset that is synthesizable, but it's harder to shoot yourself in the foot with VHDL in my opinion.
I spend a lot of my time in SystemVerilog doing verification these days. It brings some nice concepts to the verification table, but what an awful language. It's like they stapled 3 different languages together, and took everything that is bad about OO and stuffed it in there without ever asking "Does this actually make Verification easier?"