The fastest way to get a Counterparty server up and running is to bootstrap from a checkpointed DB.
mkdir -p ~/.config/counterparty-server && cd ~/.config/counterparty-server
wget https://s3.amazonaws.com/counterparty-bootstrap/counterparty-db.latest.tar.gz
tar xvzf counterparty-db.latest.tar.gz
counterparty-server --database-file ~/.config/counterparty-server/counterparty.db start &
The file download is about 256 MB iirc, and it takes less than 15 minutes to bring counterparty-server up to date once you’ve downloaded the tarball.
It’s possible to connect counterparty-server to btcd in addition to Bitcoin Core with addrindex, which means Bitcoin Core is no longer a single point of failure.
It always seemed to me like Counterblock and Counterwallet were the weak link. Counterparty-GUI is the future IMO.