I find that the better I prepare BEFORE I try to light my fire, the easier it is. Start with a good tinder bundle, ie scraped and fuzzed up bark, dry grasses, etc. Have a good amount of small kindling and an adequate amount of fire wood. A match, lighter or ferro rod should start this up pretty easily. Even if you were in survival mode, you would still need to prepare otherwise whatever you start won't last. And in a survival mode, that handy road flare in your pack should start pretty much anything up even if not prepare in the best way because you are under duress.

I like and use the PJ and cotton ball method a lot. It just makes making a fire easy. Oh, I also carry some fatwood. I have never been in a survival situation and hope I never am. If it is life or death, you can bet I will use the biggest, baddest, fasting thing that will get the job done. No such thing, to me, as overkill in that scenario. Hence the road flare. If I had a flame thrower, I would use that too.

Sorry for the long winded post. In summary:

PJ + cotton balls + fatwood + ferro rod + lighter = easy to carry on person

Add redundancy and a little emergency "overkill" = easy to carry in pack