Unfortunately there is no other solution.. I had the same issue. To speed up the backupsets tho, try setting up colocation on the storage pool. What that will do is amalgamate all the incremental backups for a server on to one tape (or 2 or 3..) as necessary.
As the incrementals build up over the period of a month, the "active" files end up getting placed on tons of tapes. The majority of the time is spent finding a file here, a file there on all the tapes.
The downside to using colocation is that you will burn through more scratches.
Another thing you may look into is an image backup. I haven't played much with that, but it might be worth looking into...