Repeater latency issues are usually tied to the squelch tail. But I like those. It lets you know that you made it in to the repeater. The half-duplex phone calling (the receiver of the phone call only hears you when you key up to transmit and you can only hear them when you stop transmitting) does take some getting used to. Most large cities today still have many repeaters. But things are different now. It’s most often dead quiet, no traffic most of the time. But you can usually find a conversation if you try. Now many of the VHF and UHF repeaters are linked to repeaters in other cities through the internet. I live in Phoenix and one day, a guy from Hawaii came-in much better than the guy in Scottsdale did. I was close to a linked repeater and the Scottsdale Repeater was much further away. Every time the power goes out, I turn on my amateur radio. You’ll get reports of the scope of the outage in seconds, even if the whole West coast goes down and there is no internet. People figure out the full scope of the outage using the world-wide bands and then they go up to the UHF and VHF bands to let everyone there know what is happening. If no one is talking about it, it’s probably only in your neighborhood.