Thank you for that question.
The air passenger protection regulations are overly complex and overly expensive to enforce, regulate, oversee and litigate. Yes, they have resulted in a significant backlog that the agency has proven to be incapable of reducing in any material way.
In regard to your question about who is being held accountable, I think there is lots of accountability to go around. It is a system designed with a number of complicators, a gradient scale of hours of waiting and different reasons for delays, and an agency that is a very effective and even world-leading regulator, but is probably not as equipped to deal, if I can put it this way, at a retail level with consumer-level-type processing. All of these things have conspired to make the system very unwieldy.