I'm gonna take a wild guess and say "keeping your place in line" could very easily result in just as many errors. The server is crashing to save itself from catastrophic failure. Saving your place in line would just mean more crashes while the server panics about how to handle the excessive load.

I could be way off here, it could be something else entirely. But, typically, when you've got something that seems "so obvious, why haven't they already done this?" It's because they've already thought of it, too, and it doesn't actually work the way people think it would.

Whatever the case, it takes time to diagnose, develop, and implement solutions. Working out how to get a band-aid fix operational just takes time and resources away from actually solving the problem itself.