I wanted to chime in on this as this is something I have been experiencing on Aether. I'm sorry but there is no excuse for 60+ min queue times during prime time on Saturday night. Matches should be popping up back to back. From the OP:

1: GC requirements cause the queues to be at the mercy of the least queuing faction. <--This is the biggest issue and its absolutely dumb that we still have GC pvp in this game after all this time. Everyone has seen how dumb it is when a game can't start because 200 flames are queued up, 200 mael are queued up but oh wait there is only 20 adders queued up so the game can't start. Before people saying anything and say that this isn't the issue it really is. It's easy as shit to test if you have an alt. People use to force pops frontline(secure) matches by queuing up adders on alt accounts.

2: Who gets selected by DF in pvp is pure rng. This is something I didn't see the OP mention and it's something most people don't even know exist. We found this out in wolves den when pvp was first introduced. Back then the most demanded role was melee. A melee would get instant queues, least on primal they did. So at night when we were trying to get rank 30 a bunch of us would be on teamspeak with most of us on melee and one healer. It was pure rng out all the melee who get picked for the next match. Some times the same person would get back to back to back pops while other people waited around. They weren't stuck in a void or anything like that, the df system just didn't pick them. Eventually luck would go your way and you would get picked. I still see this today with seal rock. Yesterday i saw a person in my flames ls get 3 pops before myself and others got even one. No waiting list and no priority system I think most people don't understand this aspect that's why there is so many theories out there about why queues take so long.

Remove the GC crap from pvp and put a waiting/priority system for pvp df and things will improve a lot. It's what other games do and I have no idea why SE doesn't do the same.