From Yoshi's post:
"Were we to continue to accept login queue requests regardless of population, ..., the lobby server would eventually be overwhelmed.

A lobby server error could potentially reset queues, which would cause even greater frustration to players who had already been waiting to log in for several hours."



While I agree with you, he has addressed your question. Would you rather try again later, or be queued, only to be dropped b/c there are too many people in the queue? Hopefully they will come up with a solution to this as well, but they have made significant progress since launch.