The solution is honestly not as complicated as some think it is

[Sotaris]

You are right, the answer is simple; the answer is just dynamically adding wards when the desirable houses fill or when filling slows. SE is just stubborn. They won't add more wards until EVERYTHING fills because that's how they measure it. Scaling apartments is a new system. New systems are harder to implement. They could, ironically, completely scrap island sanctuaries and just a TON more housing wards so we can all have the house we want instead of a bandaid instanced housing apartment fix.

We don't know how their infrastructure is like though. From a software POV, it might be possible to have it automatically scalable (adding more wards as an if/else statement), it's possible they still use physical hardware or are maxed out in their data center that holds housing data.

We actually are in a similar issue at work where all our virtual environments are "maxed" and we can't add more RAM or CPU cores cause we'd need to replace the hardware in our data center or move to a 3rd party like Amazon AWS.