If you've played over 40 MMOs over the years then you'll remember when WoW released Cataclysm and you'd end up stuck unable to log in, sometimes perpetually, and how it would crash often? How it took them a couple of days to fix that kind of stability and meanwhile you'd often get stuck in hours long queues? I remember. Sounds an awful lot like this since I couldn't progress for a while then either. Or what about when WoW released Warlords and it took FOREVER to build a garrison with server crashes galore? Took better than a day to progress then too.

I'm not saying that SE gets a free pass, I'm just saying that it's pretty much par for the course. Did it suck, yes. Has it gone on too long, yes. But it's not unique.