almost a week later and still 6 hr queues

[wereotter]

A looks like WE ALL JUST GONNA HAVE TO SUCK IT because this game apparently has a potato budget.

BUT WE CAN STILL GET A COLLAB WITH SIA RIGHT?

1 - all the money in the world can't get you something that doesn't exist, and the higher ups at Square Enix aren't willing to invest inflated amounts of money on infrastructure that will only be needed on a temporary basis. You can't force the hardware to come into existince that they need in order to do the upgrades, the developers have even talked about this. Lack or hardware and work restriction with getting people to install with with the pandemic have made the upgrades they want to do difficult to impossible in the immediate.

2 - the above said, the collaboration with Sia ran into neither of those issues. They didn't need to deal with the COVID restrictions to hear her concept, and have animations created, nor did they need to order new electronic hardware to do it, thus making your complaint of "they can do x but not y!" invalid.

A week later we still sit about 5000+ during peak hours in EU.

This is the case too on the west coast of the North America.