The entire point of early access was to get as many established players to buy Stormblood early with the incentive of giving us a jumpstart into the new content.

That is literally the very thing we can not do with the throttling of instances, and it has negatively impacted every player. This was their solution to prevent the servers from melting instead of shutting down optional content or by adding a hotfixed queue to solo instances. Both of which would allow players to comfortably enjoy the content available instead of trying to play the Rauhban and Pipin lottery to try to be the lucky ones that beat it.

Despite some datacenters starting to clear, this still negatively impacted EVERYONE playing. Giving us all a free weekend seems a perfectly reasonable apology and compensation. It's about customer trust at this point.

If early access is about server stress tests and bug findings, then they should add that to their advertisement for the pre-order incentives instead.