An old WoW guild mate who is playing FF said maybe I can try after world maintenance around 2-3 AM. Did my research and saw most of the time they get back up earlier than the stated time, can be as much as an hour (they tend to end 7AM my local time). Waited for the day, set the alarm for 5:45AM, started trying. Think it was around 6:30ish that I saw them come up and bingo, at that point, ALL worlds were wide open. Got right in.
I suspect it may take them ~5 mins after they come back up to "re-apply" the restrictions. This MAY be the only way going forward... until/unless they do some re-engineering to avoid such issues (hate to say it, but Blizzard has this under control... when the current xpac dropped, they picked up 3-4 MILLION subs (clocking in at 10 million) and were totally swamped, folks were getting "your are 4,567th in line to get in." After 2 days of that, I was not seeing such messages, although it did take another 5 days or so for EVERYONE to get in w/o a queue.
