Hi CardioMD,
Most of us that would respond have never experienced it. 50/year sounds reasonable. It also sounds insignificant, statistically speaking. Find out how many flights occur per year for the region in question (the one with fifty incidents), and you'll figure out it's a very, very small % of all flights.
Rest assured we either a) have an out where we can descend promptly to 10,000ft, or b) have supplemental oxygen so that we can reach 10,000 before you run out of oxygen.
Unfortunately, I can't tell you how much more common slow depressurizations are than the rapid kind, but I would guess it's ten times more common. The latter seems to make its' way on CNN, while the former doesn't.
With that being said, I'm sorry you're getting poor answers when trying to confirm something you know is ture. I assume it's deflection from layers of lawyers, surrounded by layers of incompetent fools, protected by layers of ignorant CSA's. The whole thing is run by greedy, incompetent, ignorant executives in the background.