This is my article directory. I am doing approval 3-5 times a day. Only Money, Webmasters & Technology News & Articles are allowed. Inline & Affiliate Links are Allowed. Product Reviews are also allowed! www.emoneyarticles.com Everyone can submit articles. Guest article submissions are also allowed!
GoArticles has automatic approval. Hence, that is the reason I do not like them. It leaves much to be desired with regards to article quality. Since there is not a real person reading the articles they accept a lot of junk articles.
the site you used is a very effective site, to have a easy PR you must write a good content and more attractive that will people like or love to read. You must have an idea how to entertain readers. That is my point of view.
When talking about article directories, "Instant approval" and "high PR" are oxymorons. Either be patient for high-PR directories to approve or be satisfied with low PR instant approvals. You can't have both. The sites are high PR BECAUSE they manually review the article.
You shouldn't worry to much about the approval time because apart from Article Dashboard (who take weeks to approve your articles these days), they all approve your articles within 1-3 days. Concentrate on submitting to quality directories instead that give you strong backlinks and lots of traffic, such as Ezinearticles, for instance.