Lobbies are usually not so busy, if not dead though and honestly, I hate waiting in lobbies in most fighting games. Lobbies can be good if you want to play with friends, but sometimes I just want to jump into a casual match without having to wait for several people to play in a room. Yeah, I know it sounds crazy.
I understand. Not saying you're wrong or anything, but there are a few things to mitigate these points.
Generally it's indeed not easy finding a good lobby, because frankly, the game is simply not that popular. But during the right hours, you'd be surprised how many players join if you create your own. Creating your own lobby has the advantage of being able to set your own rules.
Each lobby can have different matches going on at the same time, and you can also set the max amount of players waiting for a match, drastically reducing your wait time. Even if you're in another match group, unless everyone is waiting to really beat that one dude, most of the time, someone is willing to join another parallel match if they too feel they are waiting for too long.
The lobby can be set to a certain amount of consecutive wins before the winning player is switched out. In order to mitigate wait time, it's reasonable to set this to 3 matches, where then the winning player is sent to the bottom of the list again.
Waiting is not always THAT bad. You can watch others play and learn from their play style, or even prepare for their play style by forming a strategy beforehand. You can learn a lot about characters you never play (or even your own) by simply watching others play.
The matchmaking of ranked is honestly not that great. It's not rare to be matched up with players that have red connection bars and the like, having a lag-fest.