Apple screen is sticking too long with me, too. The boot process afterwards is more than okay (blazingly fast even!). So verbose mode doesn't help at all, as the verbose mode kicks in only after the Apple screen delay.
I've seen that sticking behaviour on 2 white iBooks, a Pismo PowerBook G3/500 and my own TiBook G5/400 I had to install Jaguar on. And it didn't go away either way.
One was a clean install, two were updates, one was archive & install, so I can't see a reason why a clean install would help.