I'm probably just lucky, out of the 1500+ flights in my work-travel career, my bag has failed to make it to baggage claim three times.

Of those three, the bag was twice delivered to me late in the evening or early the next morning. On the remaining one I didn't get the bag back until the second day. But that was partly due to the unusual nature of that particular trip. I flew from PDX to SAN, bag didn't arrive. Turned out they failed to load it in Portland. I needed to work for two hours at a customer site in San Diego, and the rest of my week was in Orange County (my hotel was directly across the street from SNA). So I drove up to Anaheim at around noon. Apparently they had to fly the bag to its original destination before it could be rerouted to where I needed it. The bag actually got to SAN at about 2pm. Since I didn't have time to come get it they had to forward it to SNA, which involved sending it first to SLC and then back to SNA. If I had been like normal people and just stayed for the whole day in the city I flew to, I would have had my stuff in a couple of hours.

Despite all of that, Delta told me to go buy what I needed (of similar kind and quality) and submit the receipts. So I bought about $300 worth of shirts, pants, underwear, toiletries, etc and they direct-deposited the money into my account less than 2 weeks later.

All of the "gloom and doom" that I see on FT about lost luggage is basically BS, in my experience - at least for the major domestic US carriers. Does it happen? Of course. Does it happen constantly, and to the same people, over and over? Seems unlikely in my experience.