I've used whole candles before. The little tea-light candles you can buy for 20 cents each in bulk. Forget ten minutes, they burn for a couple of hours if left alone. You can get a nice big fire going quickly by taking the candle out of its metal cup and leaving the whole thing in the base of your pile. It melts and then you end up with a puddle of wax which burns like crazy. Not all that light, compared to some other options, and not really wind resistant. But expedient.

I'm a big fan of dried fungus for fire starting. The micro-porous structure of fungus makes it catch easily, and there's very little short of drowning it in a puddle that will put it out (be careful, it floats, so you can end up with a little pyro boat). Fungus doesn't really burn with a nice flame though it only smolders steadily, so the rest of your tinder needs to be up to par.

For true survival use, it's probably hard to beat the vaseline and cotton in terms of sheer flammability, compactness and reliability.