Queue Times across the board for important trials in Shadowbringers have been ABYSMAL. Sure, that's what the Duty Support System is for in Dungeons, but when you get to important Trials like Titania, Innocence, and Hades? The Q Times are ass.

As for the Cloud Test, a lot of that stress was on the Lobby Server. I poked in there for a couple days and I could see that Q Times and Instance Stability on the Cloud was here and there at times when it came to ability execution, but it still was stable in terms of boss mechanic execution. Again, this is why they need to build the infrastructure to support the Cloud and use it for Duty/Dungeon/Trial Instances. You'd still have physical servers available for it, but I still think the Cloud is an answer.

As for pre-DC Travel, your individual DCs actually had their own cultures. Primal was essentially a DC where the Brazil community resided, and just about any Q during Shadowbringers wasn't as dead as they are now. Hell, even getting into Mhach wasn't as much of a wait time as I posted above. At most it would take somewhere around 30m for the Roulette people to fill it or get others that still needed it. It's night and day now when you have everyone congregating on Aether.