I’m not surprised you were on the list for 10 years. That seems to be the average in our area.
The inspections can be brutal. A friend of my husband’s was on Section 8 and she had to move whenever the apartment she’d been living in didn’t pass inspection. They gave her something like 30 days to find not only a suitable apartment, but to also get it inspected before she moved in. There was also the issue of finding an apartment: It’s against the law to state that you won’t rent to those on Section 8, but since the inspection process so exacting, many landlords slide past it so they don’t have to rent to them. That happened to my husband’s friend more than once. She ended up moving to a town 30 miles away from where she’d been living and hated the fact that she felt she didn’t “have a choice”.