Thanks for sharing your experiences. It does sound like the first company's "review" process was more like something they could point to and claim to be fair to deflect complaints, and less like an appropriate reward-allocation system. And given that, I would agree with your characterization of "telling you to wait" and such as a stalling tactic.
If the system were better, though--say, reviews every six or three months, and you saw people who did good work getting raises and bonuses, mediocre performances leading to stagnant pay, new hires' pay quickly reaching what might be called their "market rate"--then I suspect you'd feel differently. Though I suppose that if you thought the outcome was fair, you wouldn't make a complaint in the first place.
I'm thinking one good way for a manager to respond to a request for a raise would be to conduct a performance review of all employees on his team, and give raises to any who were found to deserve them. Unless that had already been done within the last, say, three months.
(Here's a case I heard about from the U.S. International Math Olympiad team. For background, with a series of contests they select the top 12 high school students from the nation, which become the "black" group at an olympiad training camp, and they give these students a test to determine 6 team members and 2 alternates. They also take 24 students in grade 11 or below into a "blue" group, and 24 more from 9th grade into a "red" group. Now, one brilliant kid had made it into the "black" group and onto the IMO team as a 9th grader, winning a silver medal. The following year, he did relatively badly on the contest and "only" made it into the blue group. The organizers knew he was probably among the best there and should probably be on the team, but they had to find a "fair" way to do it... so they administered the team selection test to all students in both the "black" and "blue" groups. The kid made it onto the team and again won a silver medal for the U.S.)