What is up with GTA:O?

I've been trying to get back into Grand Theft Auto Online to no avail.

It seems like most of my time is spent in loading screens or just milling about in a mostly empty map. The initial loading screen is a couple minutes. Finding a job takes another minute, and populating the lobby takes another 5+ minutes. It feels like most of the game modes are pretty dead, except for mostly races. Going from job to job takes forever, because it's hard to find them, hard to find enough people to start the game, and hard to keep a lobby running.

Has anyone else had a similar experience? Is the game just suffering from a low population?