I think until Thordan weapons dropped in November, there was very little forgiveness for mistakes in A3S.
It depends on your definition of mistakes, I guess? We had plenty of ~low% enrages before our first kill that involved losing an entire person for whatever reason (deaths, disconnects, damage down, etc.). I think i190 + Eso Weapon was around the bare minimum point for the fight and the full Eso + A1S/A2S/Gobcoat area (i206, I think it was) was the first big forgiving spot ... but "just enough" forgiveness. If you had mistakes and then just not outputting well (and less ideal of a comp, those multipliers stack up!), things were going to be bad still at this point. Thordan is where you saw basically that entire gear gap there repeated again; you doubled or more the room for mistakes you had. And then i210/Diadem on top of that? Ultimately a lot of it is there's a lot of room for mistakes, there's just a lot more mistakes than people give credit to. For instance, misaligning buffs is a big loss of DPS to the point of maybe an entire gear slot (at least) and it's usually not considered too much.
Which sort of leads into ...
This seems pretty obvious, but the amount of people recounting how many times they had to replace members, have existing people switch roles, and both of these adjustments causing regression before the group would see progress feels a bit more...comforting to know, even though that might sound strange.
I think then comes the big part of it: The base level is still above what most people get to when they play. Which may sound like a "git gud" statement but I can't blame people too much for this issue. The game does a horrible job of easing into it. It's pretty common to be there thinking "this is okay and good" but at around half of what you could be doing. Raiding doesn't need you to be 100% perfect but they do require you to know what you're doing across the entire group. Which is a big difference from previous raid tiers (and by extension, A1S/A2S since they're closer to those in difficulty) where you didn't actually need everyone on top of things all the time. And, on top of that, the gap, damage wise, has grown a bit as messing up the new rotations since HW is a larger percentage loss than it was before. So you end up with this situation now you require more from everyone and their own mistakes are worse now so it ends up being a lot of people suddenly hitting a wall that wasn't there before and stuck without the means (and then without the desire or will to) for that kind of improvement.
It's largely repeating a thing pretty much everyone has been saying forever but there's just a significant lack of in-game resources to figure out if you're actually doing what you should be doing. I'm not sure if the training dummy test they have planned will really help with this (since it's literally just deal X damage in 3 minutes) but time will tell there. There's also still just a general lack of something in between and it's always met with "but resources!" thrown at it. Just an awkward situation for facilitating that growth of the playerbase and that's really where they need to find more ways to focus on.
Why even try a more "aggressive" schedule? I thought if I just put in a lot of time up front, ie make 1-2 weeks like hell week, and cleared the content, I could go back to relaxing and just have the dream of "Reset Day is get all raid stuff done, see you next week" mode. Hah hah, yeah right...nope.
Personally speaking, I don't like going excessively without good reason to do so. 3 (to 4) days is typically fine given real progress either in terms of further in the fight, consistency in the fight, or just general understanding. Time doesn't magically do anything on it's own sort of thing. We did push hard to down A4S at the end simply because "maybe we can kill it pre-nerfs (if they come?)" but, again, goals add days, not add days to make a goal.
