New cash shop glam, still no acknowledgement. It also kind of feels like the retainer bug they addressed in maintenance was a rarer phenomenon, but it's being made out to be a scapegoat on socials.

If the retainer crash issue was the root cause, it would have stopped after the emergency maintenance, and JP, EU and OCE would be banging on Square's door too. I don't think they intended for it to come across this way, but releasing a cash shop item before addressing widespread concerns about the stability of the game feels pretty disrespectful. At best, it's tone deaf.

I'm not sure what to believe anymore. In Endwalker, when population got to be an issue, didn't they deploy a cloud server contingency? It feels like they signed a lease on some cloud servers and didn't sign again when player numbers dropped. I hate assuming the worst, but without Square being transparent, it's very hard to assume the best. Interest in the game always starts to spike when the lead up to the next expansion begins, and they've just had a solid patch. There are also several hotly anticipated features in the pipeline for future patches (housing changes, Beastmaster etc). If this really is a case of not having lasting architecture to withstand increases in player counts combined with the usual suspects (as some DDOSing, bugs and ISP nonsense is unavoidable), then they can't afford to wait until people have resubbed/pre-ordered 8.0. If it gets out that server issues are making parts of the game virtually unplayable, they may lose some of those returning players, and content creators may start talking about the server issues instead of building hype for the next expansion.

I'm begging them not to fumble this.

There's a non-zero chance they're waiting until a PLL, but I don't think this can wait until the next one. That's going to hit in like March at best, and that's way too long to expect the community to endure without reassurance.