How is it that Scanlations are still faster than Licensed releases?
This might be a case-to-case basis but here's what I noticed and what I think:

As we know, the Japanese release of manga is always the first thing that happens before it is licensed for an English translation. Using your example, the first chapter of Watamote released on August 4, 2011, and the first scanlation released two weeks after. Yen Press, however, did not announce that they licensed the series until on Sakura-Con in March 2013. That's a gap of almost 2 years. This gap cascades and builds on until the recent volume release. This gives scanlations quite a lead in terms of time since they started earlier in translating the series. This I think is the reason why the release is much later than scanlations.

Also, using Watamote again as an example, the scanlation team and the Yen Press team more or less have the same manpower (around 2-3 persons; Yen Press has Krista and Karie Shipley doing translation and Lys Blakeslee on lettering in Watamote), not to mention that the official release has an additional job of lettering (especially on Japanese 'sound effects' in some panels which scanlations usually, if not always, leave it as it is), stricter proofreading and sometimes, censoring.