Yesterday was shoddy.
I waited over an hour in The Smiler's SRQ (main was 50, so this turned out to be a mistake) while empty seats went round. Turns out the new staff on the baggage thing were too slow to keep up with the main queue, so didn't have any time to pause to let single rides through baggage and up the stairs. So the SRQ was empty in the station, and full downstairs (a frustrated batching person told us all this).
Many parks in that situation would recognise the screw-up and just let three trains worth of single riders into the main queue as a goodwill gesture.
Staffing and training is only part of the problem. There are many relatively cheap physical adjustments that could be made that would improve operations and overall experience (for example, RMT's dispatch buttons being moved to the right place at the back of the station). But all of these things require the bare minimum of investment, which they've already made clear they have no intention of carrying out.